Compass World: We Kinda Did Start the Fire

Clouds of smoke blanket the hills beyond highway 280 in the South Bay on August 19. (Chris Atwood)

Incessant peals of thunder woke the San Francisco Bay Area early on August 16. In a region where lightning is the weirdest possible weather event, social media lit up with photos and videos of the rare, “once-in-a-decade” storm. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles, tweeted, “This is probably the most widespread and violent summer thunderstorm event in memory for [the] Bay Area, & it’s also one of the hottest nights in years.” 

The thunderstorm lasted through the night and past sunrise on August 16. (Advait Arun)

Lightning in the dawn sky on August 16. (Advait Arun)

Lightning on August 16 started a small grass fire in the hills between Milpitas and Fremont. Firefighters arrived quickly to put out the small blaze. (Rimple Saxena)

Last month, Tropical Storm Fausto spit out some cool, wet, stormy air near Mexico. Abnormal wind patterns carried this air almost a thousand miles away—right into the San Francisco Bay Area, which was itself in the middle of a record summer heat wave. Firefighters and meteorologists dubbed the resultant storm the “Lightning Siege of 2020.” In just four days, more than 12,000 lightning bolts struck the ground.

FIRE

With lightning comes fire: the “Lightning Siege” directly sparked at least 560 individual fires. Many of those fires merged into what firefighters call “complexes:” large blazes within a defined area. Really large blazes. Two of the three fire complexes, each just shy of 400,000 acres—about 300,000 football fields—are now the second and third largest fires in California history.

A screenshot of Cal Fire’s Incident page on 9/3/20. The SCU and LNU fire complexes (bottom right and top left, respectively) are the second and third largest fires in California history. The CZU complex, bottom left, threatens the historic Big Basin Park and its redwood forests. (Cal Fire)

Despite their staggering size and their startlingly quick spread—both of which seriously worry climatologists—these fire complexes have killed fewer people and destroyed fewer buildings compared to previous fires. However, that doesn’t automatically make these fires “better.”

Overlay a map of the fires with a map of median household income by county (from 2014-2018) and you’ll find that the fires are worse in areas with lower median household income. This correlation is a natural result of population density and land use, but it is significant nonetheless that the fires have spared the richest neighborhoods in the Bay Area. 

Outside that bubble, at least 100,000 people have been evacuated and forcibly displaced in the past two weeks. Fire maps suggest that the Californians forced to evacuate are probably less wealthy, given where they live. In the fire-stricken North Bay (including Solano, Napa, Yolo, Sonoma, and Lake Counties), median incomes are around $30,000-$40,000 less than those in the suburban South Bay (San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara Counties). In the fire-stricken counties east and south of the South Bay (including Merced, Stanislaus, and San Joaquin Counties), median incomes are anywhere between $30,000-$60,000 less than those in the safe South Bay. The fires go where the money isn’t. 

In the less wealthy North Bay, fire evacuations have happened before. Many North Bay residents lost their homes to fire in the last three years, and some attempted to rebuild from scratch. Those who attempt to rebuild run into thorny disaster insurance problems: most North Bay homeowners are underinsured for the money it would take to restore their properties. 

In the meantime, the fires will keep coming. Property values in flammable regions will fall, business will drop off, chronic underinsurance will rise, and residents will leave. Temporary evacuations will turn into permanent migrations. Left unattended, California’s climate crisis could become a climate refugee crisis. 

But the Bay Area’s wealthier, fire-safe cities are hardly ready for an influx of climate refugees. The Bay’s prohibitive house prices and a region-wide shortage of affordable housing are just kindling waiting to be lit. When future fires inevitably create local refugee crises, the Bay Area’s historic inequality will only add to the heat.

And to top it all off? It isn’t even real “fire season” yet. That’s in October.

AIR

Heat waves are becoming increasingly common in California. The science is clear: climate change causes them to happen more often. Climate scientist Flavio Lehner observed that “Climate change is certainly increasing the frequency, severity and duration of extreme heat and warm nights” in California. According to Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, “There’s a direct relationship between heat and fire, and increasing heat is inevitable for at least a few decades. If you like 2020, you’re going to love 2050.” With ever-increasing data on their side, climate scientists aren’t just spouting hot air about the increasingly hot air. 

In fact, just as firefighters have begun to tame the fire complexes from August’s historic heat wave, another record-breaking heat wave is about to hit the whole West Coast, threatening to keep the fires going and growing. Heat waves—and the fires they cause—are normal now. 

A smoky sunset over Berkeley, CA. (Aris Richardson)

When the fires do come, they poison the air for millions of people. Right now, the Bay Area has worse air quality than several cities in India. Hayward city officials temporarily closed their COVID-19 testing center last week when wildfire-related smoke pollution reached unsafe levels. For once, COVID-19 wasn’t the worst thing in the air. 

Every fall for the past few years, Bay Area schools have debated whether or not to stay open under smoky skies. Decisions like these are often contentious, but every year they become more normal.

The formation of the Lassen County fire tornado was the reverse of the “Lightning Siege” in the Bay Area the next morning. (Twitter)

A fire tornado? Decidedly abnormal, yet it happened: on August 15, the National Weather Service office in Reno, NV issued its first-ever “fire tornado” warning concerning a storm across the state border in Lassen County, CA. The fire tornado formed when an existing wildfire’s super hot column of smoke turned into a “pyrocumulonimbus” storm cloud (you can figure out the Latin yourself), generated lightning strikes, and rotated with the wind. “Doppler radar data indicates five or more tornado-strength vortices may have occurred between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. Pacific time,” reported the Washington Post.

Wendell Hoffman, the meteorologist at the Reno office who issued the unprecedented fire tornado warning, summarized the changes in the air: “It just seems to me that things are getting drier and hotter on the fire front. You get these unusual bursts of fire spread, extreme fire behavior, it’s crazy. … But this is the first time I had seen [extreme fire behavior] in my backyard.”

WATER

The Orange County Register looked at California wildfire data between 2000 and 2015 to figure out a trend. The result is surprising: while the number of fires larger than 300 acres per year in California has generally fallen, the acreage burned by wildfires every year seems to grow. 

Scott McLean, the spokesman for Cal Fire, California’s firefighter and forestry agency, credited Cal Fire for quickly snuffing out most small fires under that 300-acre threshold. But what about the bigger fires?

Henry Coe State Park, east of San Jose, CA, is full of dry brown grass — exactly the kind that would burn easily. The park currently sits on the edge of the SCU fire complex, and firefighters are using it as a sort of base of operations to stop the complex from spreading west. (Advait Arun)

For most of the 2010s, California was in one long historic drought. In February 2015, 98 percent of the state was in at least “moderate drought,” and 40 percent of that faced “exceptional drought,” the most severe category. That drought finally ended in 2019, but 22 percent of the state is currently back in “moderate drought.”

Obviously, prolonged dry spells don’t spell so well for fire prevention. Dry weather makes for dry vegetation, which makes for easier kindling, which makes for bigger fires. But this problem is not exactly a natural one.

For centuries, before Europeans colonized California, many Native American tribes held annual controlled burns, setting what they called “good fire” to rid the land of excess vegetation. The cultural practice—it was much more than just a land management technique—prevented overgrowth, eliminated abnormally dry vegetation, and encouraged new plant growth. Setting small fires inevitably prevented bigger fires. 

In 1992, lightning started a fire in the forest around the Devil’s Postpile National Monument near Mammoth Lakes, CA. The fire wiped out most of the tree cover, and stumps litter the ground. Almost 30 years later, a new forest has begun to grow from the ruins of the old. (Advait Arun)

The U.S. government prohibited any intentional burning in California under the 1850 “Act for the Government and Protection of Indians.” The rule was less for the protection of Native Americans and more for the protection of timber forests. A century ago, the California state government again banned controlled burning as part of a fire-averse land management strategy—and intentionally deprived Native American tribes of their cultural practices. 

Preventing wildfires at all costs sounds like smart wildlife conservation, but it ends up leaving far more vegetation ready to burn than before. Thanks to more frequent droughts and heat waves, California is a ticking time bomb. 

The Washington Post, reporting on the looming heat wave this weekend, stressed the dangers of dry vegetation: “Shrubs and tree canopies, for example, are running drier this summer than they were in 2018, California’s worst fire season on record… That level of dryness in live trees allows fires to spread into canopies, burning hotter with ‘extreme fire behavior’ that can be impossible for firefighters to control.” 

California is a perfect example of how human changes to the environment affect the balance between climate, vegetation, and fire. (Twitter)

Only very recently, the California state government realized that maybe fire wasn’t something to be unconditionally feared. In an effort to tamp down future wildfires, the government is partnering with Native American tribes to restart controlled burning practices. In return, Native American tribes regain access to ancestral tribal lands and can revive an old tradition.

EARTH

Climate scientist Daniel Swain and colleagues recently published a paper that details how dry vegetation can increase the likelihood of Public Safety Power Shut-offs (PSPS). How? Because dry vegetation fuels fires, which damage the state’s power grid, providers will shut off power to protect their infrastructure. Still, Swain makes clear that PSPS policies hurt low-income communities and others without the means to buy their own solar power, for example. (Twitter)

Call California a green state, but it’s pretty brown all year. The dry weather and fires aren’t doing wonders for the state’s vegetation—or its energy grid. 

To combat climate change, cities and countries around the world are investing in green energy solutions. But, even in California, one of the “greenest” states, climate change is winning the fight.

Drier winters, on average, have reduced the state’s hydropower supply. The heat wave preceding the thunderstorms created cloud cover that halted solar power production, and that same heat wave made fossil fuel power plants less efficient. “Normally,” writes NPR, “California can import electricity from other states to fill in the gap as solar drops off [including at night, not just during abnormal weather], in addition to using natural gas power plants and other sources. But the widespread heat wave across the West means other states have little to share.”

Severin Borenstein, a UC Berkeley energy economist and a board member of California’s independent energy provider, summarized the contradiction: “We are running a system with a lot of solar. When solar goes away when the sun sets, we need other power. We have been rightly phasing out gas plants for very good reasons, but when you combine the lack of replacement for those with the crazy weather, we’re just in the situation where we’re going to be short.”

In response to this heat wave, state regulators are busy fixing their forecasts to better respond to similar scenarios in the future. Still, building more power plants is expensive, and the state needs an alternative to solar energy that can last through abnormal weather caused by climate change. Large batteries and other energy-storage mechanisms might be necessary to meet growing energy demand. However, simply using less energy in the first place is decidedly the more sustainable, cost-effective strategy.

THE ELEMENT OF CHOICE

Modern climate change is definitively a human phenomenon. Stopping Native Americans from burning “good fire” was a human rule. Idealizing conservation as perpetual preservation, fearing even the smallest fires, and not allowing for regrowth are all human choices. Demanding ever-increasing amounts of energy is a human desire. Neglecting income inequality is a human judgment. All of these choices are just that: choices. They’re in our ability to change. 

A freak thunderstorm is not a man-made phenomenon. But if a few—or 12,000—lightning strikes that we can’t control end up illuminating all the things that we can control, then maybe they did some good. Accidents like these show us how much agency we actually have. And, for what it’s worth, we still have a lot—at least, enough to make sure those fire tornadoes don’t become the new normal.