As California burns, many fear the future of extreme fire has arrived
Experts say the state’s increasingly ferocious wildfires are
not an aberration – they are the new reality
Alissa Greenberg and Jason Wilson in Redding, California
Tue 31 Jul 2018 06.00 BST
Roger Gray has lived in his suburban subdivision in a quiet
California city for 30 years. On Thursday, it was struck by a jaw-dropping
geophysical phenomenon.
Gray had defied orders to evacuate Redding, in the far north
of the state, which was threatened by the fast-growing Carr fire outside town.
He and his neighbors wanted to defend their homes. A Navy veteran, Gray worked
10 hours preparing his house and was already exhausted when he saw plumes of
smoke in the distance. “Then they started to swirl together, and I’m going,
‘Oh, we’re in trouble,’” he said.
His wife evacuated without him, driving through a maelstrom
of smoke and burning tree limbs. Not long after, “it was raining fire”, Gray
said. He could hear exploding paint cans and ammunition in the distance; he
guessed the flames were 100m tall. “Are we going to die?” his neighbor asked
him.
The firenado, a huge, rotating whorl of smoke, flame and ash,
was upon them.
Recent California wildfires in California are notable for
their ferocity. At least six people have died, including two firefighters, in
the past month in fires that continue to blaze, and 44 died as a result of last
year’s wine country fires. The conflagrations have also spawned bizarre
pyrotechnics, from firenados to towering pyrocumulus clouds that evoke a
nuclear detonation. These events are not aberrations, say experts. They are
California’s future.
As of Monday morning, the Carr fire had burned more than
98,000 acres, and containment stood at 20%, with more than 5000 structures
threatened. In the evening, Cal Fire began lifting evacuation orders, allowing
residents mostly on the east side of the fire to return home.
Awareness of fires “is not just because the news is covering
it more”, said Michael Wehner, a senior staff scientist at the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory. “More acres are burning. That is almost certainly
due to climate change.”
As the climate shifts, so does fire behavior. Summers are
longer and drier. Sometimes the winter rains are meager for years, as in the
recent five-year drought. Sometimes, like this year, they are torrential,
producing explosive plant growth that, several months later, desiccates into
prime accelerant. The needle is moving, but where it will stop is anybody’s
guess.
“Climate change is
continuing to unfold,” said Anthony LeRoy Westerling, a professor of management
of complex systems at the University of California, Merced. “The impacts from
it will probably accelerate. There won’t be a new normal in our lifetimes.”
He said the Carr fire is one of “a bunch of large fires
which have behaved in uncharacteristic ways” in recent years in the west.
Gabriel Lauderdale, a Redding firefighter, said the rhythm
has changed even during his 10 years fighting fires. When he started, sometimes
years passed without fires so big that his company was called to help outside
their county. “Now, it doesn’t just happen every year, it happens multiple
times every year,” he said. He hasn’t been home since 25 June because he has
been helping fight fires all over the state.
Of the firenado on Roger Gray’s homey street, he said: “A
lot of people have said they’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve never seen
anything like this. We can’t look at this as a one time incident. We have to
look at it as: what if it continues to happen?”
Lauderdale said he worried about the way these fires strain
resources when they get too large, as well as lack of public awareness among
city residents – like those in Redding or last year in the Wine Country city of
Santa Rosa – who might not think they are at risk during wildfire season.
Most of all, though, he said he worried about firefighters
getting worn down and becoming unable to do their jobs at this intensity for
long periods of time, as California’s fire season grows longer. Departments are
emphasizing family time and a firefighter’s mental and physical health, he
said. Sometimes they bring peer counselors or therapy dogs to especially
difficult fire sites.
He hesitated to link the recent firefighter deaths – four in
recent weeks, including two at the Carr fire – to fatigue, since each death
occurs under different circumstances. But “in 12 months, this is the fifth
firefighter death on a fire I’ve been on”, he said.
The fire inspector that died earlier this week in the Carr
fire, Jeremy Stokes, was Lauderdale’s friend and teacher, which has made
working on the Carr fire especially painful. “There isn’t a way to rationalize
it other than – he made a sacrifice for his community and the city he lived
in,” Lauderdale said. “There is not easy way to wrap your head around it. I
can’t let myself think about it too much. I don’t know if I’d be able to
continue if I did.”
Scientists emphasize that climate change is not the only way
humans are implicated in California’s astonishing fires and should not be used
to “relinquish local or individual responsibility” said University of Oregon
researcher Mark Carey. Increasingly people are building in risky areas, and forest
managers have allowed stands to grow too dense.
The most recent victims are still shocked by what they
witnessed. Gray was lucky: he was able to defend his Redding home. “We know
we’re vulnerable,” said Bernadette Coe, who has lived in a nearby town since
1985. “But there’s never been a fire this close or this fierce”.
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