It had been a day of low humidity, strong winds, and lingering drought. We had experienced over 200 days with no significant precipitation. Driving home, I turned onto the boulevard and fear leaped into my chest! Across the western horizon loomed a surreal yellow-brown cloud, billowing thousands of feet high into the otherwise clear, blue sky. If you live around here, you know exactly what it means–wildfire! Driving home faster and faster, the growing cloud remained in front of me. Worried about my pets, I prayed that the fire wasn’t in my neighborhood, then felt draining relief seeing that it wasn’t, yet. My back yard has a 180-degree view of the surrounding neighborhood and the hills beyond. I could see helicopters circling and the smoke just over the hills to the west of me. The local TV stations, were already filming the flames, reporting on the number of acres burned, the DC-10s, the number of firemen fighting its spread. Questions raced through my mind. Which direction is it blowing? How fast is it traveling? How far away is the blaze? For the moment it appeared I was safe — unless the wind changed direction.
Running through the list in my head, a bit frantically, I began packing. First the animal carriers, food and bowls, medications and anxiety chew toys. Water bottles for them and me. Important papers: deeds, insurance documents, passport. Family photos (why haven’t I digitized those?). Then, thinking I still had time, I threw some clothes in a suitcase, rounded up a few more irreplaceable items like Grandma’s quilt and my jewelry. I tried to think about the things I would need to replace that insurance might not cover, but I doubt that I have enough room in my car. It’s all stacked by the door. Do I load it? I tried to calm myself and I wait. The fire, dubbed the Hill Fire, came under control and the firefighters moved away to a smaller fire burning several miles to the east. It seemed of little concern, so I went to bed.
At one o’clock in the morning my dog needed to go out. This time when I stepped out my back door the entire horizon, west to east, was glowing orange and I could see flames in the distance. The wind was roaring. One of my 20-year-old trees was down across the wall separating my property from my neighbor’s. Fanned by 50 to 60-miles-per-hour Santa Ana winds, the second fire was now burning out of control. The Woolsey Fire was spreading rapidly. It had already jumped the 101 Freeway and was racing toward the coast beyond firefighting capabilities. By three o’clock in the morning evacuation orders couldn’t keep up with the erratic advance of the flames.
Four hours north of San Francisco, another fire, the Camp Fire, was also burning out of control. The town of Paradise had been given a warning to be on alert that they might have to evacuate, but the wind-driven flames spread so fast that by the time the communities were given the evacuation order, there was no way to do so methodically and safely. Because the fire took out fiber optics and cell towers, many people never got the order at all. The one road out of the mountain town was clogged with traffic and abandoned cars where people had gotten out and run to escape the flames. The entire town was reduced to smoldering ashes. Current reports told of nine people confirmed deceased so far, some found dead still in their cars.
One man’s terrifying experience was related to the news station. Seeing that the smoke was still far away, he thought his family was not yet under threat so continued hosing down the shrubs. Then, suddenly, police and neighbors were running down the street screaming, “Get out! Get out now!” The world became an unearthly, deep red liquid engulfing everything, sucking the oxygen out of the yard, the house, his lungs. He couldn’t find the cat but grabbed the dog. I heard him say, with honest disbelief, “It was a 100-foot wall of flames. It was a tornado! There was just no way to fight it. As we were leaving, the flames were flanking our home. We just had to go!”
Fires create their own weather. It’s an interesting situation that involves the chimney effect as heat from the fire draws in more and more of the surrounding air. As heat rises, tremendous turbulence is created by the updraft, causing the surface winds to change direction unpredictably. It can produce circular moving fire-thirls which dart around erratically, quickly spreading fire to areas outside its perimeter. In July 2000, in Redding, California, a destructive vortex of fire—a massive column of rising, spinning, smoke, ash, and fire – accelerated the Carr Fire. The key factor in the vortex formation was the development of the huge fire-generated cloud which reached 39,000 feet. This cloud helped stretch the underlying column of fire which contracted at its base creating a tornado shape as it caused a rotation near the land surface. The vortex, or “firenado,” was spinning 143-miles-per-hour, the power of a class three tornado.
On the third day of the Woolsey Fire I was still camped on the sofa in front of the TV. I had loaded what I could into my car. As the Woolsey Fire burned 0% contained, I was surrounded, west, south, and east by the miles high, dark, billowing pyro cumulus clouds. News stations reported that at least 150 homes were burned to the ground and two deaths confirmed. 200,000 people were evacuated from their homes. Most of my friends in the neighboring towns of Westlake Village, Thousand Oaks and Newbury Park were displaced and terrified that their homes would be part of the statistics. In the first 24 hours the fire made an unbelievable advance, burning 70,000 acres, all the way to the coast.
Within the television coverage, the fire departments of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties were giving status updates. Ventura County Fire Chief Mark Laurenson stated, “Six of the last seven years we have had drought conditions. We just had the hottest summer on record in California. This time of year, northern California has usually had rain and snow and their fire season is over, so we can depend on back-up support from their firefighters. But things are not the way they were 10 years ago. The rate of spread of fire now is exponentially more than it used to be.” There were simply not enough firefighters or equipment to concurrently fight multiple fires of this magnitude.
President Trump tweeted on the second day of the Woolsey Fire horror, “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments.” NOTE: Fifty-seven percent of California’s 33 million acres of forest are controlled by the Federal Government, therefore the Federal Government is responsible for managing those forests. Los Angeles County Fire Chief Daryl Osby responded, “I personally find that statement unsatisfactory and it’s very hurtful for all first responders that are putting their lives on the line to protect lives and property.”
Despite the tweet’s startling lack of empathy, President Trump was partially correct. A century of fire suppression has indeed contributed to an unsustainable buildup of vegetation providing abundant fuel for fires. A century ago, when forest fires burned the scrub, older and thick-barked fire-resistant and insect-resistant trees grew without the over-crowding that now creates heavy competition for the underground water reserves. In 1910, a fire believed to be the largest in U.S. history, burned 3 million acres across three western states and killed 86 people. This prompted the U.S. Forest Service to create policy that all forest fires be extinguished as quickly as possible. Smothering flames that for centuries had reset and renewed forests has caused an accumulation of brush and trees that now choke much of California’s open space. Grazing, logging, and land use changes, along with the Federal policy of fire deficits, have caused structural shifts in our oldest forests, and shade-tolerant, fire-intolerant species have moved in. Add on top of that years of drought that have left tinder-dry, dead grasses and chaparral and weakened trees, making them susceptible to lethal insect infestation. The World Meteorological Organization reports that California currently has 129 million dead trees.
Public officials representing California in Sacramento and DC are pushing for corrective policies to reduce the over-abundance of trees, increase controlled burns, ramp up logging and brush clearance, tighten controls on human development in danger zones, and buffer new homes built close to the wildlands.
I must be clear, however, none of the fires I saw burning around me, to which President Trump was referring at the time, were caused by poor forest management. Though the Camp Fire was started on National Forest Service land, it is suspected that power lines downed by the winds created the spark which quickly morphed into an urban firestorm and, powered by 50-mile-per-hour winds, blasted from home to home. In fact, there are two distinct “regimes” of wildfires. A study jointly conducted by UCLA, University of California-Davis, and University of California-Irvine describes the difference, calling it the “split personality of fires.” Non-Santa Ana fires are summer fires usually caused by lightning strikes and perpetuated by dry vegetation and hot temperatures. They typically burn toward the east with the season’s on-shore prevailing winds. The fires driven by off-shore Santa Ana winds and typically burning in a west to southwest direction, kick up between September and December. The size of Santa Ana fires is determined by wind and terrain and burn uphill quickly. They spread three times faster, are more intense, and do the worst of their damage in a shorter period, especially over-night. They cause seven times greater risk to structures from blowing embers which can travel miles in the wind. Burning into urban areas with greater housing values, jumping from house to house, they are ten times costlier. The results of this study show that the age of vegetation has very little to do with the probability of Santa Ana fires or with controlling the fires once they are ignited.
Santa Ana winds originate as part of the jet stream. Winds warm as they flow southward through The Great Basin, an area which extends through Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, and California. As temperatures along the coast drop in the autumn, winds are pulled westward over the Sierra Nevada Mountains and desert ranges, compressing, warming, and losing humidity. Like a river that flows gently then gains speed and force as it squeezes through a narrow, constricted gorge, the winds gain strength and speed as they squeeze through canyons, gusting up to 60-miles-per-hour. As hot winds shoot out of canyons, they cause relative humidity to drop, and vegetation dries out. All it takes is one tiny spark igniting and a firestorm explodes. With global warming, the length of Santa Ana season is likely to extend beyond the current time frame of September to December, and as temperatures in The Great Basin increase it is predicted we will see 64 percent more large Santa Ana firestorms by 2050.
As I watched my TV, the Woolsey Fire continued to scatter with the Santa Ana winds and burn uncontrolled. I knew that if the wind changed direction my home would be directly in the fire’s path. It’s difficult to know when to evacuate your home. No one wants to think about reducing your possessions to the area of a hatchback, but as I watched unfolding on the TV, the horror show of people being caught in flames, I realized, you don’t just casually load up what is on the list and pack a few clothes. Suddenly I understood, If I was ordered to evacuate, I needed to get as many clothes packed as I had room for in my car because there was a chance I would never be back in my home again.
So many people lost their lives in the Camp Fire because evacuation plans were built around the slow-moving fires of the past. Planning for a firestorm had seemed unrealistic. Believing the fire would be contained before it got to them, many of the residents who knew of the evacuation warnings didn’t leave. The most devastating fire in California history was not a normal event. Instead of a flame front that works its way through the forest, the high winds created wind- borne fire, lofting embers and firebrands that landed like rain falling on eagerly receptive fuel.
The unrealistic has become realistic. It is glaringly important that we adopt separate fire mitigation strategies for summer fires and Santa Ana fires. J. Keith Gilles, chair of the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection and Professor of Forest Economics at the University of California – Berkeley, told NBC News, “California has always been a leader with respect to sound science-based forest management practices on private land. Unfortunately, these practices don’t have much influence on wind speed, temperature, relative humidity, or drought cycles.” In a news conference three days into the Woolsey fire, Osby stated, “We are in extreme climate change right now. We don’t control the climate. We are doing all that we can to prevent incidents, mitigate incidents, and save lives.”
President Trump, in an on-ground press conference conducted as he visited the burn area near the Camp Fire, was asked, “Is there any way to prevent this from happening again?” To this President Trump replied, “There’s been a lot of study. Hopefully this will be the last one of these because this was a really, really, bad one. We’ve got to take care of the floors. You know the floors are very important. You look at other countries where they do it differently and it’s a whole different story. I was with the president of Finland and he said, ‘You know we have a much different, we’re a forest nation.’ He called it a forest nation. They spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things. They don’t have any problem. And when it is it’s a very small problem. So, uh I know everybody ‘s looking at that to that end. We’re gonna get this taken care of.”
To quote an American journalist, satirist and social critic, Henry Louis Menchen, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple – and wrong.” No doubt, Finland is an example of smart forestry practices worth studying and emulating, but we must compare embers to embers. Finland is a forest-based economy and much of their forests are small plots, privately owned. Most regions of Finland have a humid, snow climate. The northern coastal areas and mountainous regions are classified as ice climates with the warmest month under 10°C (50°F). Finland has many rivers, lakes and bays, has no dry season, and gets 27.5 to 35.4 inches of precipitation per year. Southern California has a semi-arid climate and has gotten an average of about 8.5 inches of precipitation per year in the last seven years. In the dry season, the six-month period just before Santa Ana winds arrive, the area of the Woolsey Fire gets an average of 1.3 inches.
The summer of 2018 was the hottest summer on record and fueled some of the worst fires on record around the globe. Even Finland experienced more extensive fires with 61,000 lightning strikes recorded in August alone – twice the usual number. In July, northern Sweden experienced 50 fires, torching 60,000 acres. In British Columbia, Canada, fires broke records burning 3.3 million acres, suffocating communities with residual smoke. In Portugal, temperatures topped 114 degrees and fires consumed nearly 52,000 acres. In Greece nine people were killed in a fire when Athens experienced wind gusts up to 77-miles-per-hour. In Australia, Queensland suffered a record-level heat wave and drought during November (their summer) causing fires to erupt in record-breaking numbers. Record -breaking heat conditions also led to abnormal fire activity in Norway, Germany, the U.K. and Ireland.
The Camp, Hill and Woolsey Fires added to the immense tally of destruction in what had already been a record-breaking year of fires in California. The 2018 wildfire season was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire season on record in California. A total of 8,527 wildfires burned a total area of 1,893,913 acres and caused more than $3.5 billion USD in damages. The Ranch Fire alone burned 410,203 acres, surpassing the Thomas Fire of 2017 to become California’s single-largest recorded wildfire.
Fortunately, my neighborhood never came under evacuation. That’s a relief for obvious reasons, but it also leaves my house vulnerable in an area that hasn’t burned in a very long time. If a Santa Ana fire starts north of me, I won’t be waiting to pack up and evacuate. The Hill Fire burned a total of 4,531 acres. The Woolsey fire burned 96,949 acres, destroyed 1,643 structures and was responsible for the deaths of three people. The Camp Fire burned 15,336 acres , destroyed 18,804 structures, most of them within the first four hours and was responsible for 86 deaths. Three people are still missing. Insurance estimates report that the damage of the Camp Fire was $7.5 – $10 billion USD making it the year’s deadliest, most destructive and costliest natural disaster in the world in a year of unprecedented natural disasters.
President Trump did declare a state of emergency in California and approved federal aid to Butte, Ventura, and Los Angeles Counties. The money will help cover firefighting costs along with temporary housing, unemployment, losses and supplies not covered by insurance for residents affected, and disaster related cash flow issues for small businesses. He has since threatened to cut off the FEMA dollars, though it remains to be seen how he can rescind a declaration of a state of emergency.
The past is no longer a predictor of the future. Rapidly increasing, human-made CO2 levels have already caused 1.1°C global mean temperature warming on average over pre-industrial era temperatures, exceeding that in many places. Drought severity has increased across the Mediterranean, Southern Africa, and the eastern coast of Australia over the 20th century. Semi-arid areas of Mexico, Brazil, southern Africa, Australia and most of the U.S. west of the 100th meridian have been encountering desertification for some time as the Earth warms. These areas are seeing a shift to continuous moderate drought conditions. If emissions continue business as usual, research predicts a 2°C – 4°C warming by the year 2036. This will be environmental ruin. At 2°C, fifteen to thirty percent of semi-arid regions such as Southern California will experience conditions like the arid climates we know today, such as Africa, parts of South and Central America, and Australia. The U.S. eight-year-long dust bowl drought of the 1930s will seem like a dust bunny compared with the 30-year drought we have an 80% chance of experiencing. By the end of the century, a mere 80 years, we could reach a 9°C temperature increase. Humans have never lived on a planet that hot.
Put these statistics into perspective. When your child or grandchild born today is eighteen years old, he/she will be suffering extreme drought and water shortages the likes of which have never been seen, and extreme food shortages from loss of farm-able land and ocean fisheries around the globe. Time outside in nature will have to be limited to early morning and late evening and eliminated entirely on summer days. Children trust the adults in their lives to fix problems and handle bad situations. You cannot wait for someone else to fix this for you or to force you to make a change through taxation or deprivation. YOU are responsible to do whatever you can to change the trajectory of global warming. You don’t have to fix it all by yourself. If everyone starts doing WHAT THEY CAN, we will make a difference.
What are you doing?