You’d be hard-pressed to dream up a nastier confluence of crises besieging California right now. Over the weekend, Tropical Storm Fausto propelled moisture from off the coast of Baja California up into the Bay Area, spawning rare summer thunderstorms. At the same time, the region has been baking under an intense heat wave that has desiccated vegetation, which all too easily combusted when those thunderstorms rolled through. Since Monday, almost 400 wildfires have broken out, most of them sparked by lightning. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated across Northern California, and 350,000 acres have burned so far. Overextended fire crews have contained very little of it thus far, as still more wildfires continue to ignite across the state.
All of this is happening during a pandemic that has killed almost 12,000 Californians, forcing people to remain sheltered in place at home. And to make matters even worse, in the middle of a heat wave, they can’t open their windows because air quality is now astonishingly bad as smoke continues to pour into the Bay Area. (Witness the awfulness in real time with this map.)
“Currently, there is a wildfire burning in every county in the San Francisco Bay Area, except for San Francisco,” says Kristina Chu, acting communications manager at the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. “So it's just insane the amount of smoke. The Air District and the Bay Area in general have experienced wildfires in the past, we recognize that. But it hasn't been at this level. And that's why there is so much smoke everywhere.”
The district has extended its Spare the Air alert, which in this case directs people to not burn anything, all the way through Sunday. The agency is recommending that residents remain indoors with the windows closed, and that those with air conditioning units should only run them with recirculating air.
Temperatures inland have been regularly soaring over 100 degrees, which brings twin evils. For one: Having to stay inside with the windows closed carries heat exposure risks for the elderly. These risks include heat stroke (which can lead to loss of consciousness) and heat exhaustion (which can lead to dizziness and quick and shallow breathing). Chu says that if need be, residents should seek out cooling centers—facilities where people without AC can go to cool off. (While wearing a mask and keeping socially distant, of course.)
And there’s a second evil: Heat leads to the formation of ozone, which conspires with smoke to erode local air quality. “Both pollutants together—and especially if folks are already dealing with preexisting conditions—is very dangerous, to say the very least,” says Chu. Even by itself, smoke may carry some risk during a pandemic. Covid-19 is at least in part a respiratory disease, and smoke inhalation may make the body vulnerable to infection by tampering with the lungs’ ability to expel viruses and bacteria.
California’s firefighters are struggling to contain an extraordinary number of massive wildfires, compounded by logistical challenges brought on by the pandemic. “This is a pretty major fire siege that we're in, so regardless of Covid, there are challenges,” says Christine McMorrow, communications officer with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as CalFire. “Because of Covid, we are down some of our inmate crews.” Outbreaks in prisons have taken invaluable firefighters out of action; inmates also help with logistical support, like serving food in camps that house crews and other support staff. Accordingly, California officials had to call in firefighting reinforcements from out of state.
These fire camps can be absolutely massive and are usually set up in open spaces like fairgrounds—they contain thousands of first responders, government officials, plus the media milling about. In the spring months leading to fire season, CalFire had to not only scout where to set up these camps should massive wildfires break out in the summer or fall, but also had to figure out how to set them up with adequate social distancing. “So essentially, what we're doing is just more,” McMorrow says. “More tables for eating, more tents and space for the different areas of operation within that fire camp. More hand-washing stations, more places where people can spread out.”
Right now, a California firefighter’s primary enemy is the overall lack of moisture in the air and the landscape. When you think of wildfire season, you probably think of summer, when things are dry—and that’s certainly true in California in August. But the severity of dryness not only changes seasonally, but weekly, daily, and even hourly. If a dry wind picks up, it can suck out whatever moisture is left in vegetation, priming the landscape to burn. These fire conditions can shift very rapidly, and thanks to California’s heat wave, local vegetation is already extremely dry.
Often firefighters get respite at night, when winds and temperatures drop, slowing a wildfire’s advance. But not right now, because the temperatures are staying high: In Vacaville—where some residents fled quickly approaching flames in Wednesday’s early morning hours—daytime temperatures are topping 100 and not dipping below the mid-60s at night. “They're not getting that nighttime cool down,” says Jessica McCarty, a fire scientist and geographer at Miami University in Ohio. “The winds are dropping, which is good, but the temperatures are not really dropping as much as they want, which means that the fuels themselves are still primed to burn.”
That’s making these lightning-sparked fires particularly difficult to attack, but it’s also a disheartening glimpse into California’s future. “Increased nighttime temperatures are of course directly related to climate change,” McCarty adds. “And so we can expect more of that in the future. So when these types of events do occur, what it means for management is that wildland firefighters won't have that pause. So you're talking about fighting a fire 24 hours a day.”
And California hasn't even reached peak fire season: Normally, the worst blazes arrive later in the autumn. In October 2017, the Tubbs Fire just north of the Bay Area destroyed 5,600 structures and killed 22 people. The next year, the Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 86 people, didn’t arrive until November. Last year’s Kincade Fire burned 120 square miles of Wine Country in late October. California’s current rash of fires has actually arrived a bit early, thanks to that rare outbreak of thunderstorms.
What these fires have in common are seasonal winds that arrive in the autumn, and climate change, which is pushing the winter’s first rains later in the year. That means more and more ultradry vegetation builds up through the fall. It then takes but a single spark to ignite a fire, which mighty gusts can blow through a landscape at astonishing speeds.
But fire experts are concerned that Californians may be falling into a kind of wildfire fatigue—year after year of increasingly massive blazes forcing people from their houses. “A lot of times, it is very tough to get folks to evacuate from their homes,” says Krista West, a pyrogeographer at San Diego State University and UC Santa Barbara. Residents may have ended up surviving just fine despite past warnings to evacuate, or maybe they think they’ve adequately prepared their home to resist fire, for instance by clearing away brush. Maybe they’re afraid to go to evacuation centers because of Covid-19. “The thought of being stuck in an evacuation center with a lot of other people who are already coughing, I think that that does just kind of heighten it,” says West.
Fire historian Steve Pyne calls our current era the Pyrocene—an age of flames brought on by climate change and other human actions. What you’d call it when a pandemic collides with an age of flames, we’d prefer not to speculate.
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