Fire and Plague

California has a million acres on fire right now, caused by a rare summer thunderstorm between August 15 and 19 that brought on 10,800 lightning strikes, causing 367 fires. (See an incredible composite time-lapse video taken from space showing the sparkle of lightning storms and the subsequent blossoming of fires.) Some fires are being allowed to just burn-- there aren't enough fire fighters to contain them all. 

Photo: Jeff Head (CC PDM 1.0)

At the same time, Covid-19 has been spreading across the state over the past six months, caused by an incredibly dangerous novel coronavirus that has adapted such that infected people are MOST infectious right before symptoms become evident, and it seems from population studies that half of infected people are asymptomatic but still able to spread the disease. The secondary impacts of both of these crises include skyrocketing unemployment, housing insecurity, and all of the mental health impacts of people being trapped in their homes by wildfire smoke and fear of infection. 

Add to that the numerous outrageous attacks by police and the police-adjacent in the last few months on unarmed African Americans (including Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, now Jacob Blake) and the protesters coming out to show solidarity (including Summer Taylor  -- now adding two killed yesterday in Kenosha, Wisconsin -- a full 32 deaths associated with policy brutality protests between the end of May and now)... 

And add to that the ever-slimmer likelihood that the U.S. will have a presidential election free of significant tampering by the current administration and its cronies come November... 

it's a stressful moment.

One of my coping strategies is to treat it all as a subject for study, and share what I find out with my friends to help them feel grounded in what passes for facts. I want to park a few helpful links related to the wildfire crisis here.

California Dept. of Public Health one-stop online resource center for Covid-19 + wildfire + extreme heat: Guidance and Resources for COVID-19, Climate Change, and Health Equity

A few researchers from Stanford’s Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research, Kari Nadeau and Mary Prunicki, answer some questions about Covid-19 x wildfire smoke: Stanford researchers discuss wildfires’ health impacts (by Rob Jordan, Aug. 26, 2020). TL,DR: people with higher exposure to air pollution are more vulnerable to Covid-19. 

Covid-19 is not an equal-opportunity infector: it is hitting low-income communities and communities of color far harder than other demographic groups (here's a very readable article on the subject, Moving From The Five Whys To Five Hows: Addressing Racial Inequities In COVID-19 Infection And Death, from July 2, 2020, on the health policy blog Health Affairs). It is well-documented that these communities have higher exposure to air pollution across the state. In particular: Wildfire Smoke Poses Greatest Risk to Low-Income Residents, People of Color, Experts Say (by Sarah Mizes-Tan at Cap Radio, Aug. 20, 2020)

The news reports percent containment in regard to wildfire. This is not the same as percent extinguished. What does "containment" mean when it comes to wildfire? Check out this helpful thread from Michael Wara, Director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment; he also serves on California's Commission on Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery.

How is climate change contributing to California's wildfires? Some answers surface in this conversation with climate scientist Daniel Swain on KQED's Forum by Michael Krasny (43 min.):  The Link Between Climate Change and Wildfires (Aug. 25, 2020). In this interview he emphasizes the need to return to the landscape a fire regime closer to the frequent, low-intensity controlled fire regime that was used to maintain the land under management by California Native communities.

More Daniel Swain explaining the link between climate change and wildfire, including the factoid that as climate impacts go, wildfire might not be our biggest emerging problem: California’s Climate Tinderbox: A Scientist Explains the Fire Crisis (by Eric Roston, Aug. 25, 2020)

From that interview:

We’re currently developing a statewide disaster-contingency scenario for an extreme flood event. It’s the most foreseeable disaster that everyone's going to say came by surprise. Think about what happened in 1862 in The Great Flood [a "megaflood" that swamped large swathes of California for 6 months: read more]. We know it's already physically possible, since it already happened without climate change. Today it would be a multi-trillion dollar disaster. We already showed that we think that the likelihood of this happening over the next 40 years is about 50-50. Over the next 60 years, it’s right around 100%.

Read Dr. Swain's Aug. 21, 2020, blog post about the recent lightning storm and wildfires here.