California braces for record heat even as
wildfire smoke keeps windows closed
High temperatures raise fire risk while poor air
quality prevents residents from going outdoors amid Covid-19
Vivian Ho
Thu 3 Sep
2020 00.23 BSTLast modified on Thu 3 Sep 2020 00.25 BST
Record-high
temperatures are expected across California for the holiday weekend, increasing
fire risk and exacerbating poor air quality for residents yearning to go
outside because of the pandemic but forced indoors because of smoke from nearby
fires.
As fires
continue to burn throughout the state, the National Weather Service (NWS)
declared excessive heat watches in the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento
starting on Saturday and lasting until Monday. In Los Angeles, where
temperatures of 100F to 115F were expected away from the beaches, dangerous
heat was declared.
“This is an
exceptionally dangerous event, especially considering the holiday weekend and
the ongoing pandemic,” warned the NWS forecast office in San Diego. “This event
will be hotter than the recent mid-August heat wave. Temperatures this high,
and this widespread, are rarely ever seen in this area.”
The NWS
also warned of an increased risk of power outages, as more Californians will
want to use their air conditioners amid the heat – and it highlighted an
increased risk of vegetation fires. “Elevated to briefly critical fire weather
conditions can lead to dangerous plume-dominated fire growth,” the forecast
reads.
This heatwave strikes as typical air-conditioned public spaces such as malls and libraries remain closed in many locations because of Covid-19. “Those without air conditioning should make preparations now to stay cool,” the NWS said.
For many
residents in regions choked by wildfire smoke – many of whom do not have air
conditioning – the small respite offered by an open window is no longer an
option because of the air quality.
The
heatwave comes on the heels of a lightning event that sparked a series of
wildfires throughout the state. Since 15 August, nearly 14,000 lightning
strikes have ignited 900 wildfires across California that have burned more than
1.5 million acres – 2,344 sq miles – and killed eight.
The
excessive heat watches are expected to cool to heat warnings by Wednesday or
Thursday next week.
OPINIÃO
Califórnia. De paraíso a inferno
Em plena crise corona continuamos na nossa vida
quotidiana a não considerar o determinante problema do clima com a urgência que
merece.
António Sérgio Rosa de Carvalho
27 de Agosto de
2020, 6:06
https://www.publico.pt/2020/08/27/opiniao/opiniao/california-paraiso-inferno-1929394
Em 1970 os The
Mamas & The Papas anunciavam o paraíso da Califórnia.(1) Paraíso garantido por clima ameno e referências
culturais “mediterrânicas” residuais da antiga colonização espanhola,
características largamente apreciadas pelas classes abastadas, estrelas de
cinema e também os hippies de São Francisco.
Na tarde de domingo/16 de Agosto de 2020 o
famoso Vale da Morte na Califórnia registou a temperatura de 130 F, ou seja 55
graus C, talvez a mais alta temperatura jamais registada no Planeta. Ora, este
local é um dos mais inóspitos do planeta, constituído por uma paisagem de
ficção cientifica.
Precisamente, nos filmes desastres/ficção
científica a ruptura do sistema através das alterações climáticas é sempre
imaginada em mega eco-cataclismos, facilmente reconhecíveis pela Humanidade. No
entanto, em plena crise corona onde podemos experimentar um “cheirinho “de
distopia, na qual todas as nossas assumidas seguranças desaparecem
instantaneamente, continuamos na nossa vida quotidiana, apesar dos sinais
progressivamente visíveis e dos avisos permanentes da classe científica, a não
considerar o determinante problema do clima com a urgência que merece.
Na Califórnia, o Verão, devido à conjugação de
altas temperaturas, seca e tempestades tropicais transformadas em trovoadas
“secas”, fontes de ignição de milhares de focos de incêndio em áreas mais e
menos remotas, transformou-a num verdadeiro inferno. Portanto, aqui temos um
exemplo concreto e nitidamente visível, digno de um “filme-desastre” anunciador
de cataclismo/distópico/global, de que a Califórnia se está a transformar num
imenso “Vale da Morte”.
Façamos uma comparação em números do fenómeno:
No mesmo período do ano passado a Califórnia registou 4,292 wildfires nos quais
arderam 56.000 hectares. Este ano o número subiu para 7002 ‘wildfires’ nos
quais arderam 1 milhão e 400 mil hectares com a destruição de 12.000
estruturas.(2) Ora num discurso “normal” de
predicados e atractivos turísticos, é comum comparar Portugal à Califórnia. A
13 de Outubro de 2018, aqui no PÚBLICO (3) eu
afirmava “que segundo as estimativas de alterações do clima, a Península Ibérica
vai transformar-se num imenso deserto inabitável.”
Muitos poderão considerar esta imagem
alarmista, mas basta, por exemplo, consultar a “estratégia” esboçada por Costa
e Silva para a Floresta Nacional, para ficarmos informados sobre o rigor, a “visão”
e a efectividade da qualidade planeadora do mesmo.
Num outro artigo aqui no PÚBLICO (4) intitulado
retoricamente “Coronavírus, o dia seguinte” eu, referindo-me à pausa distópica
provocada pelo vírus, perguntava: “Vamos, finalmente, aprender alguma coisa,
parar para reflectir, durante esta pausa a que fomos obrigados por este ‘factor
externo’, microscópica mensagem emitida pelo macro organismo onde estamos
inseridos?”.
A resposta a esta pergunta fundamental, vamos
obtê-la muito brevemente no determinante resultado das eleições americanas.
Determinante para todo o mundo, quando o actual Presidente dos EUA,
simplesmente, nega categoricamente que o problema do clima existe. Segundo ele
trata-se de mais uma teoria da conspiração.
Historiador de
Arquitectura
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-aK6JnyFmk
3- https://www.publico.pt/2018/10/13/opiniao/opiniao/apres-nous-le-deluge-1847403
4- https://www.publico.pt/2020/03/16/sociedade/opiniao/coronavirus-dia-seguinte-1908033
Wildfires rage, Covid spreads: in California,
life as we knew it has disappeared
The devastating blazes began just as I began a
two-week quarantine. We desperately need leadership
Dana Frank
Thu 3 Sep
2020 11.20 BSTLast modified on Thu 3 Sep 2020 11.21 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/03/california-wildfires-covid-19
At 10am on
16 August, I drove east from Santa Cruz to Oakland to my mom’s nursing home,
where I was being allowed in, in full PPE, to kiss her a last goodbye. As I
curved north through San Jose, I could see a billowing steel-gray fire cloud
among the hills to the east. Lightning flashed past Berkeley as I pulled into
the parking lot. On the way home, I took the long route across the San Mateo
Bridge, then over the top of the San Francisco Peninsula and south from Half Moon
Bay. Halfway down the coast I saw a helicopter dropping bright red pillows of
retardant on to a fire streaming its smoke in a flat horizontal panel out to
the ocean. Ten minutes later I passed white smoke pouring down another canyon
on my left. Before I pulled into my driveway at the edge of Santa Cruz, I could
see a fourth, giant fire spewing far to the south beyond Salinas.
By
afternoon it was clear that the fires I’d seen were just a few of the hundreds
sparked all over northern California by freak thunderstorms that weekend, in
which 10,800 lightning strikes ignited 367 fires. Soon, hundreds of the small
fires converged into bigger and bigger ones, so fast and so vast that Cal Fire
didn’t even give names to the largest ones as it usually does, resorting to
acronyms like the SCU Lightning Complex, the LNU Lightning Complex, and my own
fire to the north and east of Santa Cruz, the CZU Lightning Complex.
Two of
those fires are now the second- and third-largest in California history. By 28
August, the largest, the LNU fire north-east of the Bay Area, had burned
371,000 acres. Together, the fires have burned over a million acres. We’re in
“unprecedented” mode, here, as climate change, Covid-19, and other factors
converge to wreak vast destruction.
By Monday
the 17th we knew quite how serious the fires were. The first looming threat was
to the 100,000-person city of Vacaville, between the Bay Area and Sacramento,
where walls of flame moved in on tract houses in residential neighborhoods. The
TV showed median barriers aflame at night alongside Interstate 80, eight lanes
of cars sliding past them a foot or two away.
I sat in
the backyard in the middle of that day amid 10ft-high sunflowers bathed in
eerie diffuse golden light, waiting for the phone call that my mother had died.
Two hours later after the call arrived, the nursing home texted that 20
residents and staffers had just tested positive for Covid-19; four had been
hospitalized. I began the process of contacting relatives, banks, and the
lawyer, and of counting the 14 days until I could de-quarantine myself and come
remotely near any of my loved ones – although never less than 6ft, and always outside,
as for the last five months.
By Tuesday
it was clear that Santa Cruz and broad swaths of the greater San Francisco Bay
Area were in big trouble, and the fires were spreading uncontrolled throughout
the local mountains and up the coast. Ash floating down innocently, coating our
cars. We began to obsessively watch Cal Fire’s press conferences on our
computers three times a day, in our own local version of the New York governor
Andrew Cuomo’s Covid briefings on C-Span. We even had our own new rock star, a
handsome man named Michael with long black wavy hair and hip suits, a
sign-language interpreter.
Local
evacuations began. They started high up in the mountains, in the towns of
Boulder Creek and Bonny Doon, and the small coastal towns northward –
Davenport, Pescadero, La Honda. Every day new towns were cleared out in
succession down the San Lorenzo Valley, through close-knit communities of
ageing hippies, working-class rural people, and Silicon Valley commuters. By 25
August, 78,000 people had been evacuated from Santa Cruz county alone.
Would the fires drive all the way to the sea,
destroying our entire city, like the Paradise fire two years ago?
My best
friends Gerri and Steve evacuated from Ben Lomond on Wednesday. Steve, a
botanist, moved two carfuls of his 50-year-old succulent collection down to a
friend’s house in Santa Cruz, and then, when the evacuation zone threatened
southward, moved them farther around the Monterey Bay to a friend’s in
Watsonville. He left behind the rest of his plants, unwatered in 90F heat, and
he and Gerri took refuge in their daughter’s tiny apartment in Santa Cruz. Soon
the evacuation line marched down all the way down to lap at the city limits,
six blocks or so away from them. Would the fires drive all the way to the sea,
destroying our entire city, like the Paradise fire two years ago?
The next
day I packed up my own things into piles by the front door, making agonizing,
sudden choices about what to leave behind. Unlike residents of rural
California, who live with evacuation threats every summer and fall, I’d never
thought it through before.
That night we
all felt a body blow: the headquarters buildings at our beloved Big Basin
Redwoods state park, the first state park in California, built by the civilian
conservation corps in the 1930s, burned to the ground. I was conceived in that
park; I’ve researched and written about its history. Suddenly it was just
another disaster story in the New York Times. With their bark of asbestos, the
1,500-year-old trees will survive. But it was rough to see photos of lurid
flames glowing within their trunks.
During
those first several days, Cal Fire never quite provided exact maps of the
fire’s edges, as it has in past fires. Eventually the spokesperson admitted
that they didn’t actually know where the fires began and ended. They were
massively understaffed. “Typically, in an area of that size, would have
probably 10-20 times the resources to put out that fire. We simply don’t have
it,” admitted Mark Brunton, an operations chief for Cal Fire, referring to the
fire in the Bonny Doon area, north of Santa Cruz. “In my 34 years of doing
this, I’ve never been this early in the seasons with this many catastrophic
fires.”
Because of
the Covid-19 risk, the firefighters have had to practice social distancing;
they can’t just hop into trucks together or get close on the lines. In past
years, a solid chunk of California firefighters have been prisoners working
under widely denounced conditions. But 8,000 prisoners have been released
because of Covid, sharply limiting that pool.
Most
powerfully, the sheer scale of fires has overwhelmed the system. In the face of
such unprecedented demand, there weren’t enough helicopters or planes to survey
the extent of the fires or drop fire retardants – and most days the smoke was
so bad they couldn’t fly anyway. Daniel Swain, a climate researcher at UCLA,
tweeted that on Friday: “This is probably the most widespread and violent
summer thunderstorm event in memory for Bay Area & also one of the hottest
nights of the year.” Brunton, the Cal Fire chief, described burning conditions
that were “unprecedented and unseen by veteran firefighters”.
This is
what climate change looks like.
By
Saturday, the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I taught for 30
years, had been evacuated, and the line was eight blocks away from my house
along the coast. The air quality became deeply threatening. I sealed up all the
doors and windows with packing tape; used a chamber system of sealed rooms to
exit or enter the house (and didn’t leave); and had to repress my panic at the
new, higher level of isolation. We couldn’t even visit in backyards any more –
if we were privileged to have one. I started tracking statistics and curves by
the hour: the percentage of fire contained, the number of people evacuated, the
air quality index (43, great, run outside!; 78, rut-roh; 189, nooo … !)
Students
and researchers at UC Santa Cruz sit in front of a sign thanking first
responders, on 24 August.
The EPA
said we should choose a “clean room” big enough for the whole family, keep it
sealed off, and use a wet cloth to constantly wipe its surfaces clean.
Now add
Covid-19 to all that, and track the daily Covid numbers for Santa Cruz, still
alarmingly high. Where do 74,000 northern California evacuees and their pets
and livestock go, if everyone’s households are sealed off for virus protection?
Which relatives or friends let whom in? Government refuges opened immediately
in the high schools, the civic auditorium, and other venues; but, full of
people inside in close quarters, shared bathrooms, they’re ripe for mass
contagion. The mask advice is now reversed: cloth masks don’t work for smoke,
you need an N-95 mask; and you’re wearing it to protect yourself, not others.
On Sunday
the National Weather Service announced a dangerous red flag warning for the
next 48 hours, on high alert for high winds and new lightning that could spark
new fires throughout the state, which would stretch the meagre resources still
further. The Los Angeles Times reported that if the firefighters couldn’t hold
the line at Boulder Creek, at the top of the San Lorenzo Valley, they would let
the flames sweep down all the way through the towns below, to the bulldozed
line at Santa Cruz. I’d just been reading Willa Cather’s 1918 novel My Ántonia,
with its haunting story of Pavel and Peter, the Russians driving a sled in the
cold moonlight who watched as a wolf pack picked off the dozen sleds behind
them one by one, and finally threw the bride out of their own sled to lighten
the load. Would Gerri and Steve’s house, two-thirds of the way up the valley,
be tossed to the wolves? On Monday, the new storms didn’t materialize and the
weather service lifted the Red Flag early. I wept for the first time.
We need government, and government not in
service to institutionalized racism and elite greed
I am vastly
privileged in facing this. As the air thickens and poisons, the region’s
farmworkers are trying to survive an ever more deadly environment. Many of them
are Mixtec indigenous people from Oaxaca, Mexico, who go to work every day
without Covid protection, trying to keep from starving and hoping to send money
to those without food at home. California farmworkers live in substandard
housing with little ability to social distance at work or at home, and, like
other Black and brown peoples of this country, they are dying in droves. Two
maps of California now overlap: one from the EPA, with red zones showing the
state’s worst air quality often accumulating in the Central Valley near Fresno,
and a second one from the state’s health department showing rising Covid cases
in the same zone.
As I write,
it is now day 13 into the fires and of my post-nursing-home personal Covid
quarantine. The briefings tell us optimistically of 26% containment, of
“repopulation” zones. They are alternately cheering and careful, as they warn
of new dangers: burned bridges, falling trees, thick layers of organic matter
called “duff” burning on the forest floor that moves in clandestine ways to
undermine roads and cross under hard-fought fire lines.
We aren’t
venturing out far – the air quality is still too terrible much of the time, and
the roads closed. I’m not exactly unpacking, just warily plucking daily shirts
and socks out of the suitcase. We know that many of the historic ranch
buildings on the north coast are gone, and their owners’ livelihoods. More than
700 houses have burned down. In response, beautiful networks of mutual aid are
proliferating on social media to provide shelter, take in livestock, and drop
off meals, in all the moving ways people take care of strangers in these
situations.
But it’s
not enough. We need government, and government not in service to
institutionalized racism and elite greed. How do we channel those mutual aid
networks, and the vast need for a government that serves all the people, into a
better future?
My mom is
gone, and so is life as we knew it once again. We awake to yet another new
reality, another reconstruction of our daily lives. We begin, now, to imagine
doing simple tasks – going to the post office, say – but then remember, wait,
the world out there is still all changed; it’s still dangerous to come in and
out its door as maskless strangers veer toward us.
In answer
to our pleas, the cavalry from Idaho, Canada, Australia did arrive. But soon
they’ll move on, leaving us to make it through the worst of the fire season
still ahead in September and October. We are waiting patiently for the rains to
come in late October, far away. We are waiting for 3 November. We are waiting
for the vaccine.
We look to
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal star in the sky. But visibility
is often 25ft, so we hunker down and share our extra cellphone chargers, our
N-95 masks with broken elastic, our detective novels, and our love, and open
the doors of our hearts.
Dana Frank
is a research professor of history and professor emerita at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, and the author, most recently, of The Long Honduran
Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup
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