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| Paradise gone" This neighborhood in Paradise, California was wiped out along with most of the rest of the town by the Camp Fire. |
Plus, it's been raining the past couple of days That's great news, and greatly contributed to the fact the fire was declare 100 percent contained today.
But the rain has its own share of risks. More on that in a bit.
Now that the fires have abated, this gives us a chance to take stock and take a deep dive into this disaster. There has been some misinformation, confusion and doubts about the fires. It's always good to try and get the facts, because lessons need to be learned. What follows is not perfect, and reasonable people might disagree with me. But we really should have the discussion.
WORST CASE SCENARIO, FOR NOW
Just when people thought things couldn't possibly get any worse than the Tubbs Fire last year, which killed 22 people and destroyed 5,643 structures, we had this year's so-called Camp Fire.
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| This illustration is of the Peshtigo, Wisconsin wildfire of 1871 that killed at least 1,200 people. It shows some people trying take refuge in a nearby river. It's the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history. Are deadly wildfires making a comeback? |
They're still looking for hundreds of missing people. We don't know how many of those are just lost in the shuffle after the chaos of the evacuation, and how many were lost to the flames.
The fire destroyed some 13,000 buildings, including virtually the entire town of Paradise, California, with a pre-fire population of about 27,000.
This was America's worst wildfire in a century. Back in the 1800s and early 1900s, there was a spate of even deadlier fires in the United States. An 1871 wildfire around Peshtigo, Wisconsin killed some 1,200 people in 1871. A 1918 wildfire in Minnesota killed roughly 1,000 people. Another Minnesota fire in 1894 claimed at least 418 lives, notes Jeff Masters in the Category 6 blog.
While the United States has always had wildfires, blazes that would kill scores or hundreds of people became rare in the 20th century.
Now, these horrible death fires seem to be on a comeback. I'm aware of just four wildfires that each killed 15 or more people in the era between 1930 and 1990.
There was an uptick in such fires beginning in the 1990s, and now they're even more frequent. Category 6 blog lists five fires that have killed at least 13 people just since 2003. (This includes the Camp Fire.)
Something seems to be going on. Too many people moving to forest lands? That's only a small part of the story. Poor forest management? We'll get into that in this post, but that's not the whole picture either. What about climate change?
CLIMATE CHANGE DIDN'T "CAUSE" THIS FIRE
In the late summer and autumn, central and northern California are often plagued by something called Diablo winds.
Air circulates up from the deserts further south, so this air is very dry. The wind hits the eastern slopes of the mountains in northern California then heads westward, up and over these ridges.
Once over the tops of the mountains, the winds continue westward, gaining momentum as they head down hill. The gusts get stronger and stronger. As the air races downhill, it actually gets even drier.
A small spark can start a nasty wildfire under these conditions There are reports there was a problem with a PG&E high tension line near Paradise that might have sparked the fire. If that's the case, the Diablo winds took advantage of this situation and the conflagration was borne.
Most wildfires are caused by humans. They haven't really come up with a cause for the Tubbs Fire yet, but it also might have been a PG&E line failure. Teenagers playing with matches might have caused the Gatlinburg, Tennessee wildfire in 2017, but arson charges against the teens have been dropped.
Once the fires have started though, a lot of them have become much more extreme than in the past 100 years. That finally brings us to climate change.
CLIMATE CHANGE VERY LIKELY MADE THE FIRE MUCH WORSE.
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| Northern California was tinder dry (brown shades) on the days leading up to and on the day of the Camp Fire |
UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain tweeted:
"If Northern California had received anywhere near the typical amount of autumn precipitation this year (around 4-5 in. of rain near #CampFire point of origin). explosive fire behavior & stunning tragedy in #Paradise would almost certainly not have occurred."
Swain then went on in his very helpful Twitter thread:
"Rainy season has started late this year in California...again. While autumn precipitation isn't usually (a) huge fraction of overall annual average, it's hugely important to ecosystems & bringing fire season-ending moisture. This yr., autumn precip was <20-30% of avg."
Swain added on Twitter: "Objective indicators of vegetation dryness and potential fire intensity were are record high levels for the date this week in the vicinityh of #CampFire -- and would have been very high even for peak summer levels -- at a time of year when the rainy season is usually ramping up."
Droughts and late starts to rainy seasons happen, with or without global warming. But climate change seems to have made these conditions more likely in the western United States, which would make this type of fire more likely.
Strong downslope winds propelled the Camp Fire, but those winds often happen this time of year. Had moisture been close to normal the winds wouldn't have been a big deal in a damp forest.
In southern areas of California, things have really dried out in recent years, too. As Sierraclub.org points out:
"Unusually dry conditions have prevailed in the Santa Monicas during recent years. Based on rainfall totals since 1877, 11 out of the last 15 years have seen below average rains. During the 2006-2007 season, only 3.21 inches of rain fell, the lowest ever recorded."
Climate change tends to make things hotter and drier in areas like California. Scientists are also increasingly embracing one effect that climate change seems to be having: That of a "stuck" jet stream
I've mentioned this idea in this blog before, but to review: The jet stream, which is a river of high speed air, steers weather systems, mostly west to east across the Northern Hemisphere. A healthy jet stream thrives on a very cold Arctic contrasting with hot tropics.
The Arctic is warming up much faster than the rest of the world, so that contrast is diminishing. The result seems to be a slower and wavier jet stream that is more likely to get "stuck" in position.
Abnormally strong northward bulges in the jet stream, like California had most of this year and New England and eastern Canada had this summer, create long lasting heat waves and often, droughts. Abnormally deep southward dips bring repeated shots of cold air southward, keeping areas strangely frigid, kind of like we in the Northeast have been going through in recent weeks.
Even a weak dip in the jet stream can cause havoc if it get's stuck too long. This summer. such a weak, stuck dip contributed to record rains in the Mid-Atlantic states. Bottom line: Stuck jet streams are bad, and could become even more likely as the planet warms. That could contribute to more and worse wildfires in some areas, epic floods in others.
TRUMP WAS (MOSTLY) WRONG WHEN HE BLAMED FOREST MANAGEMENT
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| Donald Trump surveying the fire destruction in Paradise, California. He is mostly wrong when he attributes poor forest management to the disaster. |
That's why there's been an increase in "controlled burns" which are intentionally set and watched when there's little danger of them becoming catastrophes.
Trump's Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, blamed the wildfires out west on lefty environmentalists:
He said: "Every year we watch our forests burn, and every year there is a call for action. Yet, when action comes, and we try to thin forests of dead and dying timber, or we try to sustainably harvest timber from dense and fire-prone areas, we are attacked with frivolous litigation from radical environmentalists who would rather see forests and communities burn than see a logger in the woods."
First of all, that's insulting. I can't imagine even the most radical environmentalists experiencing any joy or satisfaction about the extreme loss of life and destruction from the recent wildfires.
Zinke is also on shaky factual ground. As the New York Times points out, Zinke is right that there are a lot of dead and dying trees in California. Drought and heat contributed to that. So did an influx of devastating insects that survive better in hotter climates. However, it's not the dead and dying trees that catch fire so easily. At least initially.
They're too big. When you start your fireplace, you don't hold a match to a big log and expect it burn. You start with small stuff, kindling, and work your way up. Forest fires work that way, too.
Besides, when you thin a forest, you risk creating an explosion of highly flammable weeds and shrubs on the forest floor. Fewer trees mean less shade, and these kinds of plants can thrive.
As the New York Times notes, thinning of forests in California leads to the growth of something called cheatgrass, which is highly flammable when it dries out.
On the edge of Paradise, California, which was destroyed in the wildfire, forest thinning happened about a decade ago. When the fires started earlier this month, there was plenty of cheatgrass there to burn.
And no, raking the forest like you would your lawn won't help. Finlanders don't spend their days raking forest, by the way, unless they do so to mock Trump.
The poor forest management argument really falls apart when we're talking about southern California.
The fires in southern California burned through chaparral, brush, grass and whatnot. There are no forests to speak of to burn around Malibu and Thousand Oaks. You can't mismanage a non-existent forest.
This lack of grace and knowledge by the President certainly ticked some people off
For instance, The Pasadena Fire Association tweeted this:
"Mr. President, with all due respect, you are wrong. the fires in So. Cal are urban interface fires and have NOTHING to do with forest management. Come to SoCal and learn the facts & help the victims Scott Austin, Pres IAFF 809."
Brush fires have always been a real risk in southern California during the autumn. The stuff that grew during the previous winter and early spring rain season has always dried out by autumm. You've heard the song "It Never Rains In Southern California." The song is right, at least until usually December of so.
COUGHING IN THE SMOKE, OR WORSE
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| Air quality was dangerously bad during the Camp Fire as smoke spread through the San Francisco bay area and much of northern and central California. Photo by Eric Rosberg/AP |
Smoke from the fires have settled over much of California during the Camp Fire, before the rains came in. The San Francisco Bay area, often a place where you could breathe fresh, clean Pacific Ocean air, had the worst air quality in the world in the days after the Camp Fire.
This air pollution is yet another example of how fires, likely made worse by climate change, can affect so many unsuspecting people.
The smoke is regarded as "particulate" pollution. The smoke consists of tiny particles that can embed themselves in people's lungs, causing current health problems in people exposed to the smoke. This mostly effects the elderly, children and people with existing respiratory ailments. People will continue to get sick a couple weeks after the smoke clears, but these immediate effects will wane.
However, the long term health effects of breathing all this thick smoke are not entirely known, says NBC News:
"Longer-term impacts of such exposure, meanwhile, are little understood. Few studies have been conducted to track the helath of people months, and years, after they have been exposed to high concentrations of 'particulate' pollution. The emissions are similar to toxic particles released with the burning of fossil fuels. But fire fumes could pose an additional risk, because they include chemicals released when homes and cars - and their attendant insulation, plastic and metal - burn."
Of course, the vast majority of the smoke consists of burned grass, trees and brush, not human-created chemicals, so that's vaguely a good thing, I suppose.
We do know that long term exposure from smoke from things like wildfires increased the rates of chronic bronchitis, reduced lung function, lung cancer and heart disease, but I don't exactly know how you define "long-term."
I'm guessing a few days of such pollution isn't all that bad in the long term, but if this kind of thing keeps happening, and people are repeatedly exposed to weeks of wildfire smoke, we might start to see some real long term effects. It won't be as bad as somebody who has smoked a pack of cigarettes each day for decades, but it still won't be great.
WHY COULDN'T PEOPLE ESCAPE?
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| Desperate people fled on foot after cars became stuck on congestion roads during the chaotic evacuation from the Camp Fire in Paradise, California. Photo by Randy Vazquez/Bay Area News Group. |
That prompted the municipal government to draft an evacutation plan. Some neighborhood residents fleeing a fire would drive down certain roads, others would drive out of danger using different routes.
The community even held a mock evacuation during the morning rush hour, to mimic crowded roads in the middle of an emergency.
In this case, the best laid plans failed to work. People who were trying to flee got stuck on gridlocked roads. Panicked people got out of their cars and tried to flee on foot. Most of those made it. Some didn't. A number of people burned to death in their cars.
You'd think a good plan in a fire-conscious community like Paradise would go better than this. The problem was, all 27,000 residents tried to flee at once. The fire came on so strong, so fast, so extensively, that everybody had to leave at once. It wasn't what was planned, what normally happens.
One neighborhood is threatened, so people there flee. The fire moves on, threatening another housing development, so those people go.
"I think their plan would have worked for the 97th percentile fire," Bill Stewart, co-directorof the Berkel Forests Program at UC Berkeleu told the Los Angeles Times. "It would have worked if they had six hours to move, instead of two."
Nobody planned on fires being this quick, this explosive, this fast-moving. It just wasn't within the realm of imagination. That had tragic results. This, perhaps is related to the climate change problem I discussed earlier.
Climate change is the present and future. But what happened in Paradise is also a legacy of history. The roads in the area were laid out by gold miners and railroads decades or a century or more ago. The roads were designed to weave their way through canyons, hills and ridges to access minerals, not evacuate lots of people in an emergency.
That said, there were plenty of heroes.
PEOPLE COME THROUGH, BIG TIME
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| Nurse Allyn Pierce drove through Paradise, California wildfires repeatedly to evacuate people. The truck (left) was scorched and melted after the fire. Toyota Motor Company heard about Pierce's bravery and gave him a new truck (right). |
There's the bus driver who somehow got 20 kids about of a Paradise elementary school and drove through the flames to get them out.
The kids were choking on the smoke, so he too, off his t-shirt. He and teachers aboard the bus tore the shirt into little pieces, soaked them in water and put the wet pieces of cloth over the kids' mouths to protect them from the smoke.
I also have to give props to a Paradise, California nurse named Allyn Pierce, who ferried people out by driving through flames, twice. The trips left his Toyota Tundra truck melted and scorched, pretty much destroyed.
The Toyota Motor Company got wind of this and will give Pierce a new truck, gratis. Small gesture in the grand scheme of the tragedy, but it makes me and everybody else feel good, so it's exactly what was needed.
People far from the fire zone stepped up, too, sometimes in surprising ways.
The other day, Peter Sagal (Host of "Wait, Wait! Don't Tell Me! on NPR) tweeted, "People are strange, sometimes in delightful ways."
Sagal was referring to the actor James Woods. Woods had basically turned himself in recent years into a particularly annoying pro-Trump Twitter troll.
Then the California fires flared up this month. Woods turned his Twitter account into this unending emergency response and relief effort. Woods tweeted day and night, forwarding pleas for help from fire victims and sending those who wanted to help in the right direction to the right people.
I was impressed. As were many others. As is I guess human nature during catastrophes, Woods rightly abandoned political ideology and just reached out to help. One of the people he helped was the actress Alyssa Milano.
Milano had been evacuated from her southern California home by the wildfires, but she needed help getting her horses out of harm's way.
Woods and Milano are polar opposites, politically, and I'm sure they've had negative things to say to one another. But the two cooperated, the horses are safe and everybody's that much happier.
THEN THERE ARE THE IDIOTS
Of course, there are a few idiots that always make things worse. We got into it a little bit with Trump and his minions. But of course there are worse people.
Again, there are too many to do an exhaustive review, but on the bright side there seems to be far fewer villians than heroes.
One example would be Dave Johnson, the GOP chair of Columbiana County, Ohio. Earlier this month, he posted to social media images of the fire with the message "God's Punishment to Liberal California." Another message on the photo said: "Hell on Earth, brought to you by the liberals in California."
Frankly, as a gay guy, I'm a bit relieved by this. The "religious" right, if you can call them that, have long blamed the gays for every single disaster that has ever befallen the world. As if somebody like me had that much power.
Now, they've broaden the blame out, so it's anybody who's liberal who's to blame. Funny, I don't see any footage of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rampaging through California as evil arsonists, but what do I know?
Johnson deleted his posts after a public outcry.
NOW THE RAINS COME
The rain started in northern California this past week. As of today, one to two inches of rain has fallen on the fire area, and a lot more is on the way. The rain has cleared nuch of the smoke, tamped own remaining fire and is preventing new ones from starting.
With steep hillsides stripped bare by the fires and even underground tree roots incinerated, there's not much to hold the soil in place. We're at the start of the California rainy season, so for the next several months we'll have to worry about more devastation from mudslides and debris flows in areas where the fires burned over.
Especially in northern California, where it's cooler, little or no new vegetation will start growing until next spring. It's going to be a dangerous winter.
Now, some videos.
Here's a video tour of the Paradise area. Notice how hit and miss things were:
This is an intense video of a father and sons trying to get out of Paradise after the fire. They're trying to hold it together as they think they're out of danger, then they're back in danger, then out, then in.
You can hear the extreme relief at the end when they begin to emerge from the darkness
and see blue sky up ahead, meaning they were finally safe:
Here's an absolutely heartbreaking CBS Morning News report of a woman, a nurse at the local hospital, who didn't think she'd make it out alive, but somehow did. However, her father's house
is just ashes now, and that father is missing.
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