[D66] NYT: DISASTROUS WAVE OF CLIMATE EVENTS SLAMS CALIFORNIA

[R.O.]

Cascade

NYT:

A Climate Reckoning in Wildfire-Stricken California

By Thomas Fuller and Christopher Flavelle

     Sept. 10, 2020
     Updated 9:07 p.m. ET

SAN FRANCISCO — Multiple mega fires burning more than three million 
acres. Millions of residents smothered in toxic air. Rolling blackouts 
and triple-digit heat waves. Climate change, in the words of one 
scientist, is smacking California in the face.

The crisis facing the nation’s most populous state is more than just an 
accumulation of individual catastrophes. It is also an example of 
something climate experts have long worried about, but which few 
expected to see so soon: a cascade effect, in which a series of 
disasters overlap, triggering or amplifying each other.

“You’re toppling dominoes in ways that Americans haven’t imagined,” said 
Roy Wright, who directed resilience programs for the Federal Emergency 
Management Agency until 2018 and grew up in Vacaville, Calif., near one 
of this year’s largest fires. “It’s apocalyptic.”

The same could be said for the entire West Coast this week, to 
Washington and Oregon, where towns were decimated by infernos as 
firefighters were stretched to their limits.

California’s simultaneous crises illustrate how the ripple effect works. 
A scorching summer led to dry conditions never before experienced. That 
aridity helped make the season’s wildfires the biggest ever recorded. 
Six of the 20 largest wildfires in modern California history have 
occurred this year.

If climate change was a somewhat abstract notion a decade ago, today it 
is all too real for Californians. The intensely hot wildfires are not 
only chasing thousands of people from their homes but causing dangerous 
chemicals to leach into drinking water. Excessive heat warnings and 
suffocating smoky air have threatened the health of people already 
struggling during the pandemic. And the threat of more wildfires has led 
insurance companies to cancel homeowner policies and the state’s main 
utility to shut off power to tens of thousands of people pre-emptively.


“If you are in denial about climate change, come to California,” Gov. 
Gavin Newsom said last month.

Officials have worried about cascading disasters. They just did not 
think they would start so soon.

“We used to worry about one natural hazard at a time,” said Alice Hill, 
a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who oversaw 
resilience planning on the National Security Council during the Obama 
administration. “The acceleration of climate impacts has happened faster 
than even we anticipated.”


Climate scientists say the mechanism driving the wildfire crisis is 
straightforward: Human behavior, chiefly the burning of fossil fuels 
like coal and oil, has released greenhouse gases that increase 
temperatures, desiccating forests and priming them to burn.

Mark Harvey, who was senior director for resilience at the National 
Security Council until January, said the government had struggled to 
prepare for situations like what was happening in California.

“The government does a very, very bad job looking at cascading 
scenarios,” Mr. Harvey said. “Most of our systems are built to handle 
one problem at a time.”

In some ways, this year’s wildfires in California have been decades in 
the making. A prolonged drought that ended in 2017 was a major reason 
for the death of 163 million trees in California forests over the past 
decade, according to the U.S. Forest Service. One of the fastest-moving 
fires this year ravaged the forests that had the highest concentration 
of dead trees, south of Yosemite National Park.

Further north, the Bear Fire became the 10th largest in modern 
California history — burning through an astonishing 230,000 acres in one 
24-hour period.

“It’s really shocking to see the number of fast-moving, extremely large 
and destructive fires simultaneously burning,” said Daniel Swain, a 
climate scientist in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability 
at the University of California, Los Angeles. “I’ve spoken to maybe two 
dozen fire and climate experts over the last 48 hours and pretty much 
everyone is at a loss of words. There’s certainly been nothing in living 
memory on this scale.”

While the state mobilizes to deal with the immediate threats, the fires 
will also leave California with difficult and costly longer-term 
problems, everything from the effects of smoke inhalation to damaged 
drinking water systems.

Wildfire smoke can in the worst cases be deadly, especially among older 
people. Studies have shown that when waves of smoke hit, the rate of 
hospitalizations rises, and patients experience respiratory problems, 
heart attacks and strokes.

The coronavirus pandemic adds a new layer of risk to an already perilous 
situation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued 
statements warning that people with Covid-19 are at increased risk from 
wildfire smoke during the pandemic.

“The longer we have bad air in California, the more we’ll be concerned 
about adverse health effects,” said John Balmes, a spokesman for the 
American Lung Association and a professor of medicine at the University 
of California, San Francisco.

As for drinking water, scientists have known for years that runoff from 
burned homes can put harmful chemicals into ground water and reservoirs. 
But research in the aftermath of the 2017 wildfires in wine country 
north of San Francisco and the 2018 fire that destroyed the town of 
Paradise in the foothills of the Sierra discovered a different threat: 
Benzene and other dangerous contaminants were found inside water 
systems, possibly from heat-damaged plastics in the water infrastructure.

“Communities need to recognize this vulnerability,” said Andrew J. 
Whelton, a professor in environmental engineering at Purdue University, 
and an author of a study on water contamination in Paradise.

“Dangerous chemicals can leach from inside water systems for months 
after a fire.”

The Environmental Protection Agency classifies water with benzene levels 
above 500 parts per billion as hazardous. Some samples in Paradise after 
the fire were found to have 2,000 parts per billion. In Sonoma County 
after the wine country fires some samples had 40,000 parts per billion, 
Dr. Whelton said.

Before now, many Californians assumed it would be an earthquake that 
might knock out their power, damage their homes and render their 
neighborhoods uninhabitable.

Susan Luten, a retired lawyer in Oakland, lives near the Hayward fault, 
an area that seismologists warn is due for a major earthquake. But it is 
the threat of fire that prompted her and her husband to put their go 
bags by the door — shoes, a change of clothes, flashlights, whistles, 
medications, small bills and duct tape.

“We have a rope inside the house in case we have to escape down the 
steep hillside on foot rather than by driving a car,” Ms. Luten said. 
Her husband studied Google Maps for escape routes.

The whiplash of the multiple crises in California has played out in 
their living room.

“Two days ago we were roasting inside with the windows closed in a heat 
wave to avoid heavy smoke,” Ms. Luten said.

“Today we are cool, but unable to see across the street,” she said on 
Wednesday, when the entire San Francisco Bay Area was shrouded in a 
faint orange glow, the sun obscured by massive columns of smoke in the 
atmosphere. “Combine all of this with a pandemic and political menace 
and it’s hard not to think we are unwitting bit players in some sort of 
end-of-days movie.”

Emily Szasz, a graduate art history student from Santa Cruz, said she 
felt like she was in a strange, unfamiliar land.

“I feel as though I’m somewhere I’ve never been before,” Ms. Szasz said. 
“There were wildfires occasionally throughout my life here, which would 
be quickly fought and contained. Never do I remember 23 straight days of 
orange, oppressive, smoky skies, leaving my house in fear that I’d never 
return to it, or knowing someone whose home burned down in the mountains 
near my house.”

Several years ago, as a student at the University of California, 
Berkeley, a professor explained that California and the West were likely 
to experience the effects of climate change sooner than the rest of the 
country, Ms. Szasz said. The words now resonate with her.

“There is no greater proof, nor should we require it, that climate 
change is here and is changing our lives,” Ms. Szasz said of the 
wildfires. “I am only 25 years old and I do not know what future there 
is for me, let alone my potential children and grandchildren.”

Even after this year’s fires are put out, their ripple effects will keep 
spreading, creating economic shocks — in the insurance industry and with 
the state’s power grid, to name two examples — well beyond the physical 
and health damage of the disasters themselves.

This summer millions of Californians’ homes went dark for an hour or 
more as the smothering summer heat threatened to overload the grid.

Those blackouts are separate from the pre-emptive shut-offs carried out 
by California utilities in an effort to prevent their equipment from 
sparking wildfires. This week, Pacific Gas and Electric turned off power 
to about 170,000 customers — a continuation of a program of extensive 
power shut-offs that began last year.

In the insurance industry, years of heavy losses have pushed companies 
to pull back from fire-prone areas, in what state officials call a 
crisis of its own. A lack of affordable insurance threatens to devastate 
housing markets, by making homes less valuable and harder to sell.

Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of 
California, which represents insurers, said the industry was waiting to 
see how big this year’s losses were, and what the state does next.

“We have to use it as a clarion call,” said Mr. Wright, the former FEMA 
official who is now president of the Insurance Institute for Business & 
Home Safety, an industry-funded group that looks at how to reduce damage 
from disasters. “What we can’t do is simply cover our ears, hunker down 
and go, ‘I just want this to go away.’”

Philip B. Duffy, a climate scientist who is president of the Woodwell 
Climate Research Center, said many people did not understand the 
dynamics of a warming world.

“People are always asking, ‘Is this the new normal?’” he said. “I always 
say no. It’s going to get worse.”



Thomas Fuller reported from San Francisco, and Christopher Flavelle from 
Washington. Ivan Penn contributed reporting from Burbank, Calif., and 
John Schwartz from West Orange, N.J.

Thomas Fuller is the San Francisco bureau chief. He has spent the past 
two decades in postings abroad for The Times and the International 
Herald Tribune in Europe and, most recently, in Southeast Asia. 
@thomasfullerNYT • Facebook

Christopher Flavelle focuses on how people, governments and industries 
try to cope with the effects of global warming. He received a 2018 
National Press Foundation award for coverage of the federal government's 
struggles to deal with flooding. @cflav

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 11, 2020
of the New York edition with the headline: DISASTROUS WAVE OF CLIMATE 
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