President Trump will visit California on Monday to be
briefed about blazes that have burned more than three million acres. Tens of
thousands of people have evacuated in Oregon.
Oregon’s fire marshal resigned amid an “internal
personnel investigation,” and officials in Southern Oregon reported additional
deaths.
- ‘We could be looking at a challenging Sunday’ as dozens remain missing in Oregon.
- Homeless seeking shelter, rescued condors and a lost cat: local tales from the fires
- Shifting weather may improve firefighting conditions on the West Coast.
- Times reporters are covering the wildfires from the ground.
- Oregon’s fire marshal resigned as firefighters battle blazes.
- A sheriff’s deputy is punished after saying antifa members ‘are out causing hell.’
‘We could be looking at a challenging Sunday’ as
dozens remain missing in Oregon.
Dozens of
people remain missing in Oregon as wildfires that have torched millions of
acres across the West continue to burn on Saturday, the death toll rising to 20
and smoke choking residents in cities far from the fires.
With the
blazes still spreading and many homes destroyed, Oregon’s director of emergency
management said this week that the state feared a “mass fatality incident.”
Three additional deaths in the state were announced after his warning, and
later on Saturday, Nathan Sickler, the sheriff in Jackson County, Ore., said
recovery crews had found the remains of a total of five people this week in the
wreckage of the Almeda Fire.
“It’s sad
and I don’t have more information than that at this time,” Sheriff Sickler
said.
But as
residents prepared for more pain, they also hoped that changing weather might
help them this weekend. Doug Grafe, chief of Fire Protection for the Oregon
Department of Forestry, said that the strong winds that had spread the fires
had dissipated, and that cooler temperatures and higher humidity would help
fire crews fight the blazes.
Oregon,
Washington and California are all under assault from a wildfire season of
historic proportions, with the firefighting effort compounded by the
coronavirus pandemic and misinformation online. President Trump will visit
McClellan Park, Calif., on Monday to be briefed on the wildfires, the White
House announced.
Senators
Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, both Democrats of Oregon, and Representative Greg
Walden, a Republican whose district includes the site of the Almeda Fire,
visited an evacuee relief site in Central Point on Saturday morning. The
congressmen were scheduled to tour the cities of Phoenix and Talent, which were
devastated by the blaze.
We have now
— currently have — five active fires that are five of the most destructive
fires over the last, in the history of the state, five of the 20 most
destructive that are currently being suppressed, which is just remarkable when
you consider that we just came out August, the hottest in recorded history.
Nineteen people have lost their lives in these fires. We anticipate that number
may potentially go up as we get back into areas that have been ravaged by
flame, and obviously smoke begins to clear. Thirty-nine hundred-plus structures
have been destroyed. The good news is the winds have settled down. The good
news is there’s weather starting to appear offshore that will create an
environment where we may get a little bit of precipitation — a modest amount of
precipitation. Want to just, again, express deep respect, admiration for all of
our front-line folks out there doing the hand crew work, doing the work on
making sure we’re dozing, creating these breaks.
The climate crisis is a factor, but so are efforts to
fight fires - which have had the opposite effect
Alastair
Gee and Dani Anguiano
Sat 12 Sep
2020 11.22 BSTLast modified on Sat 12 Sep 2020 21.47 BST
We call
them wildfires, but that might not be the right word any more.
In recent
days, at least five whole towns have been destroyed by fire in Oregon. So has
much of Malden, Washington, and swathes of Big Creek and Berry Creek, both in
California.
To many
people this will seem like deja vu. In 2018, another town was also wiped off
the map, in the most dramatic recent example of this horrible genre. Paradise,
California, was much larger, home to 27,000, and it was destroyed in just a few
hours. Eighty-five people were killed.
The places
now being ravaged are not forests or chaparral located somewhere out there, in
the wilds. Instead the current wildfires demonstrate how easy it has become for
fires to invade our suburbs and towns, with their 7-11s, gas stations and
doctors’ offices, and lay them to waste. Where will this end? The prospects are
disturbing.
To
understand how we got here, it is important to know that we have come to expect
control over such conflagrations relatively recently. Prior to European
settlement in the West, fire flowed freely, sparked by lightning or
intentionally by Native Americans to encourage the growth of favored plants or
clear areas for easier hunting. As much as 4.5m acres of California’s 105m
acres might burn every year. These low-intensity fires did not kill large
trees, and some plants even came to depend on fire to regenerate themselves. A
shrub called chamise appears to encourage fire by releasing combustible gases
in the presence of flames.
The shift
to a different approach occurred after several instances in which wildfires became
appalling urban fires. In October 1871, railway workers sparked a brush fire in
northern Wisconsin, which swept into the city of Peshtigo and killed 1,500
people there and elsewhere across a gargantuan footprint of 1.2 million acres.
And in the great fires of 1910, fires burning across several Western states
killed hundreds and razed a number of towns. People escaped by train as the
fires virtually licked at their heels.
After this
the US sought to suppress all wildfires before they could gain a foothold. In
the 1930s, the US Forest Service instituted its so-called 10am policy,
according to which fires had to be stamped out by that time the next day. Later
came the “10-acre policy”, dictating that fires should not be permitted to grow
beyond that size. Fire was the enemy, an idea catalyzed by wartime imagery of
firebombed cities such as Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo. Smokey Bear helped to
reinforce it, too.
This strategy
had a pronounced effect – though not necessarily in ways that were intended.
Fire activity decreased, it is true, but with scouring flames removed from the
environment, forests grew far denser and brushier than they had been before. In
one Arizona forest, 20 trees per acre became 800 trees per acre. These forests
can and will burn more severely. In addition the climate crisis is rendering
vegetation ever drier, and by 2050 up to three times more acreage in Western
forests will burn as a result of global warming. Meanwhile 60m homes can now be
found in or close to high-risk areas where wildfires have previously burned.
Cue urban
fires. The fire that obliterated Paradise on the morning of November 8, 2018
was sparked in a rural river canyon several miles to the east of town. As we
describe in our new book, Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy, it approached
the community at speeds previously thought impossible, chewing through almost
400 American football fields’ worth of vegetation per minute. It hit like a
hurricane. Strikingly, many of the hundreds of thousands of trees in the town
were spared – it was the homes that became matches setting fire to the next.
The fire was so quick, so hot, that people died seeking shelter under their
cars, in the driveways of their homes while holding a hose, or huddled in their
bathtub.
Lincoln
Bramwell, the chief historian of the US Forest Service, told us that the story
of Paradise “reads like these accounts from the late 19th century”, of fires
like Peshtigo, back before we had sought to bring wildfire under our command.
“I see us going back to the future,” he added. “Going back to a time when fire
was not under our control.”
As
Americans in California, Washington and Oregon are discovering, wildfires do
not only impact the wilderness. Towns and suburbs are not inviolate. With so
many of our Western paradises now under threat, experts are begging us to bring
controlled fire back into the ecosystem in the form of prescribed burns. To
ensure buildings meet stringent fire codes. And to prepare city evacuation
plans so we do not repeat the gridlock in which many of those escaping Paradise
were trapped. We must, it almost goes without saying, get a handle on the
climate crisis.
Witnessing
the urban fire in Paradise, some of those we interviewed for our book no longer
thought it fanciful that a fire that could maraud into the very heart of a
major city, such as Los Angeles, San Diego or the communities of the San
Francisco Bay.
University
of California scientist Faith Kearns recounted to us that she lives in the
Berkeley flatlands, in a part of the Bay that is as thoroughly urbanized as can
be. Suddenly she was considering the prospect that a fire might one day reach
her home.
“My
neighborhood is full of Victorians. My neighbor’s window is about six feet away
from my own…” she said, pausing in thought. “I think we’ll see it. I think
we’ll see it.”
Alastair
Gee and Dani Anguiano are the authors of Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy,
available from WW Norton.
Trump to Visit California After Criticism Over
Silence on Wildfires
The announcement came after the president acknowledged
a wildfire season that so far has claimed at least 20 lives and destroyed
millions of acres of land in California, Oregon and Washington.
By Annie
Karni
Sept. 12,
2020
WASHINGTON
— After weeks of public silence about the wildfires devastating the West Coast,
President Trump scheduled a visit to California on Monday, where he will join
local and federal fire and emergency officials for a briefing on the crisis.
The
announcement of the visit, which was added to a three-day campaign swing
through Nevada and Arizona, came after Mr. Trump tweeted Friday night thanking
the firefighters and emergency medical workers. It was the president’s first
acknowledgment in almost a month of a wildfire season that has claimed at least
20 lives and destroyed millions of acres of land in California, Oregon and
Washington.
“I have
approved 37 Stafford Act Declarations, including Fire Management Grants to
support their brave work,” Mr. Trump wrote, referring to an act that frees up
federal funds and other resources to help supplement state and local efforts.
“We are with them all the way!” Notably absent was any mention of residents who
have been living under smoke-filled skies, many forced to evacuate their homes
in the middle of a pandemic.
Mr. Trump’s
silence has been more noticeable because of his outspokenness over the past
week on many other subjects that advisers believe could have a more direct
effect on his standing in the polls against his Democratic rival, former Vice
President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
On Labor
Day, for instance, Mr. Trump held a news conference to herald the improvements
in the economy and defend himself after The Atlantic published a report that
said the president had made disparaging remarks about the military’s service
members. At two rallies in Michigan and North Carolina, Mr. Trump made inflated
and inaccurate statements about his own accomplishments as he campaigned in
critical battleground states. And on Twitter, he has attacked Democrats and
protesters while promoting false claims about the dangers of mail-in voting.
The
wildfires — which have created apocalyptic images of orange-hued skies, and
served as a reminder of the consequences of climate change — have not come up
in any of his public remarks in weeks.
In one of
the last times he mentioned the fires, he blamed the state of California for
its forest management. “I said you’ve got to clean your floors, you got to
clean your forests,” he said at a Pennsylvania rally in August. He added,
“Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t
listen to us.”
A statement
released by Mr. Biden on Saturday underscored all that the president himself
had left unsaid.
“To the
families who have lost everything; to the people forced to evacuate their
homes; to the brave firefighters and first responders risking their lives to
protect their neighbors — please know that we stand with you now,” Mr. Biden
said.
Mr. Trump
has long clashed with California. The state’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra,
has filed multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration, on issues like
immigration, health care and environment policy. For its part, the
administration has never appeared to hold back in confronting the state, and
the president last year publicly blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom of California for a
succession of wildfires and power outages that battered the state.
Democratic
lawmakers from California suggested Mr. Trump was uninterested in helping a
blue state. “There’s a deep feeling that you get different treatment in this
administration, in terms of speed and attention, based on how people have
voted,” Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles said in an interview on Saturday. He
credited the Federal Emergency Management Agency with coordinating closely with
local officials but described the administration’s overall response as
inconsistent.
“If someone
calls my office for help, I don’t ask for their political affiliation or how
their neighborhood voted,” Mr. Garcetti said. “It would be refreshing to have a
president who thought the same way when people are losing their homes and
everything they ever had. He doesn’t blame the Gulf Coast for hurricanes, but
he blames California for not raking?”
White House
officials said on Saturday that the president was actively engaged in addressing
the crisis and had offered assistance to California and Oregon.
Answering
questions from reporters on Friday, Mr. Newsom said that during a 30-minute
phone call a day earlier devoted to the wildfires, the president had
“reinforced his commitment to our effort.” But on Saturday night, Mr. Trump
dismissed the deadly blazes by blaming them on California’s leadership. “It is
about forest management,” he said at a rally at the Minden-Tahoe airport in
Nevada.
A White
House spokesman, Judd Deere, said the president was closely monitoring the
affected areas like California and had pledged federal relief, in addition to
approving a disaster declaration. The administration has also deployed more
than 26,000 federal personnel and 230 helicopters to the region, Mr. Deere
said. A spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget did not respond to
a request for a total figure of how much federal funding the administration has
provided those states.
Just before
the White House announced Mr. Trump’s plans to visit to California, Mr. Deere
also defended the president’s decision to stay away from the affected areas,
noting that a trip to survey the damage would divert resources from fighting
the wildfires.
The
behind-the-scenes aid, and the work of agencies like FEMA, has not stopped some
people from criticizing the president’s response.
Lori Lodes,
the executive director of Climate Power 2020, wrote on Twitter, “I know I
shouldn’t be surprised by anything anymore but the fact Trump and his
administration haven’t said A SINGLE WORD about the fires ravaging the west is
enraging.”
Miles
Taylor, a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security
appointed by Mr. Trump, said recently that he witnessed the president seeking
to cut off federal funding for California to combat wildfires simply because it
is a Democratic stronghold.
“He told us
to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down from a wildfire
because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support
him, and that politically, it wasn’t a base for him,” Mr. Taylor, who served in
the administration from 2017 to 2019, said in an advertisement by a group
supporting Mr. Biden’s candidacy.
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