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Northern
California firestorm ‘literally exploded,’ killing 15 and
destroying hundreds of homes
More
than 200 have been reported missing after fast-moving fires devastate
communities north of San Francisco
10
October, 2017
High
temperatures and fast winds are fueling more than a dozen wildfires
across California, forcing more than 20,000 northern California
residents to evacuate their homes and communities. At least 15 people
have died, and more than 200 have been reported missing, after
several fires spread rapidly throughout Monday.
The
fires ignited late Sunday night and into Monday morning and have
since spread over 50,000 acres across Napa and Sonoma counties,
destroying at least 2,000 structures and sending at least 100 to the
hospital with injuries ranging from burns to smoke inhalation. The
Tubbs Fire — which is currently burning at 27,000 acres — has
prompted the evacuation of at least 10 neighborhoods in the city of
Santa Rosa, which has a population of 125,000. Two hospitals have
also been evacuated after the fire jumped across Highway 101 between
Sunday night and Monday morning.
Aerial
photographs show entire neighborhoods of the city completely
destroyed by the fire, which as of Tuesday morning was zero percent
contained. Smoke from the wildfires caused the Bay Area Air Quality
Management District to issue an air quality warning for the region on
Monday; as of Tuesday, much of the area north of San Francisco was
still experiencing unhealthy air quality.
The
cause of the fires is still under investigation, but officials are
confident windy conditions combined with an excess of dry grass and
underbrush helped the fuel the fires’ rapid growth. According to
the National Weather Service, “fire literally exploded and raced
along the landscape” aided by fuel at “all time record dry
levels.”
September
and October tend to be the worst months for California’s fire
season, as strong winds can combine with low humidity and dry
vegetation to turn a single spark into a major incident. At the
beginning of September, fast-moving winds and record-heat sparked the
largest wildfire in Los Angeles’ history, burning more than 5,000
acres north of the city. The worst wildfire in California history —
the Cedar Fire of 2003 — started in October and burned more than
273,246 acres, destroying 2,820 structures and killing 15. Already,
the scope of this weekends’ fires rivals the destruction of the
Cedar Fire.
There’s no words to describe the destruction of the #tubbsfire. Many families are coming home to find... this.
Fast-moving
winds and low humidity aren’t rare in California, and neither are
October wildfires, but it’s likely climate change made these fires
even more destructive. After years of historic, prolonged drought,
which studies have linked to climate change, California experienced
record-setting rains that fueled the growth of grasses and underbrush
— young vegetation that dries easily during the summer and is
especially susceptible to ignition. Because warmer atmospheric
temperatures can hold more water, experts have suggested that the
cycle of drought followed by intense precipitation could be linked to
climate change.
Even
the state’s characteristic winds — known in the northern part of
the state as Diablo Winds and in the southern part of the state as
Santa Ana winds — could be getting worse because of climate change.
The Santa Ana and Diablo winds occur when high inland pressure pushes
air down the sides of mountains (Mt. Diablo in northern California
and Mt. Ana in southern California), whipping wind through the
canyons and hillsides outside major population centers like Los
Angeles and San Francisco. According to a 2015 study lead by
researchers at University of California, Los Angles, UC Davis, UC
Irvine, and the U.S. Forest Service, a warming climate will likely
make these winds both more frequent and stronger, fueling potentially
destructive fires.
Across
the country, warm, dry conditions have fueled a record-breaking fire
season. The National Wildfire Coordinating Group currently lists 179
active wildfire situations throughout much of the Western United
States, from Colorado to Washington. The largest active fire in the
United States is the Chetco Bar Fire in southern Oregon, which has
burned over 191,121 acres and is 97 percent contained. As of October
6, wildfires have burned 8,469,590 acres across the United States —
the third largest total acreage burned in the last 10 fire seasons.
According
to an analysis by Climate Central, climate change has increased the
length of the annual fire season, a reference to the time of year
when conditions are ripe for wildfires, by 105 days since 1970. Over
the same period of time, the average number of wildfires over 1,000
acres has doubled across the western U.S. Since 2000, at least 13
states have experienced their largest fires on record.
As
climate change is fueling longer fire seasons, human activity —
both through an intense focus on fire suppression, rather than forest
management, and an decreasingly populated rural-urban boundary, are
making fires more destructive and deadly. A longer and more active
fire season is also stretching the bounds of the Forest Service’s
budget, with 2017 fire suppression costs already exceeding $2
billion, making this the most expensive year on record.
Unlike
disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes, wildfires don’t qualify
for federal disaster funding under the Disaster Relief Act; instead,
the Forest Service is forced to pay for fire suppression costs in
excess of the budgeted amount by borrowing from other Forest Service
programs. That means in especially active fire years, the Forest
Service is taking money from programs meant to prevent fires and
using those funds to fight existing fires — a cycle that critics of
the current set-up argue puts the Forest Service at a perpetual
disadvantage when it comes to anticipating and preventing forest
fires.
“Land
managers can’t plan for restoration projects, even if they have
huge fire benefits, if they don’t know whether the money is going
to be there by the time they get around to doing the project,”
Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife
Federation, told ThinkProgress. “An account for a forest in
Tennessee could be slashed to fight fires in Wyoming, and then all of
the sudden you could have a terrible fire in Tennessee the next year,
and you didn’t get the project done, so it ends up burning bigger,
brighter, and longer than it would have if you had the projects
completed.”
Since
2015, the Forest Service has spent more than 50 percent of its budget
on fighting wildfires — more than a thirty percent increase from
1995, when fire suppression was just 16 percent of the agency’s
budget. According to a 2015 report, future fires could consume even
more of the Forest Service’s budget, to the point where by 2025,
two-thirds of the agency’s budget could be spent on fire programs.
One
legislative solution for the Forest Service’s budget woes currently
being considered in Congress would allow the agency to draw from a
separate pool of federal disaster funds, similar to what other
agencies can do through FEMA after a disaster like a tornado or
hurricane. That bill, known as the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act of
2017, is sponsored by a bipartisan coalition of nine Western senators
— five Democrats and four Republicans. In the House, Rep. Mike
Simpson (R-ID), has introduced a similar bill for the past three
years. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) has urged Republicans in
Congress to oppose the bill in the past, arguing that it would
“result in increased federal spending.”
Fiscal
conservatives in Congress have instead proposed a different way to
address the rising costs of forest fires: loosen environmental
regulations to allow timber companies more leeway to thin forests,
thereby lessening the amount of fuel available for wildfires. One
bill, introduced this year by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR), would do
away with the public input and full environmental review process for
thinning or logging projects of 10,000 acres or less (currently, only
projects 3,000 acres or less are subject to less stringent
environmental regulations). It would also allow the Forest Service to
forgo required consultations with the Fish and Wildlife Service if
the agency determined the project was unlikely to harm a federally
protected species.
Westerman,
who has received more than $142,000 from the timber industry since
being elected to Congress in 2014, has argued that the bill would
“provide protection to America’s forests by reducing the risks of
wildfires through proper management techniques.” Westerman received
a master’s degree in forestry from Yale Forestry School in 2001,
and is the only licensed forester in Congress.
But
environmentalists, conservationists, and Democratic lawmakers argue
that the real problem with the growing cost of forest fires isn’t a
lack of management techniques, but a lack of funds with which to
implement them. Even Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has
criticized the current funding structure of the Forest Service,
saying in September that without a consistent stream of funding,
“we’re asking for disasters.”
“You
can have all the tools in the universe, but if you don’t have the
resources to implement that, it doesn’t matter,” the National
Wildlife Federation’s O’Mara said. “And that’s where we are
right now.”
The
offshore gales that propelled massive blazes in Wine Country will
return Wednesday night and Thursday, increasing the risk of fires in
the North Bay, according to the National Weather Service.
At
least 15 people were killed and 2,000 structures were leveled after
the fires erupted late Sunday, tearing through northern Santa Rosa,
the Wine Country and elsewhere in the North State.
And
the ravaged areas are still vulnerable. Forecasters issued a red flag
warning for the North Bay hills from 5 p.m. Wednesday to 5 p.m.
Thursday, and for the East Bay hills from 11 p.m. Wednesday to 5 p.m.
Thursday.
A
cold front is bringing winds expected to hit 30 mph or stronger, with
gusts up to 45 mph, especially in the hills. The winds will be coming
from the northeast rather than the typical onshore pattern off the
ocean.
The
weather service warned that any fires that ignite will escalate
rapidly, and asked people to refrain from outdoor burning. The
blustery winds could topple power lines and touch off new fires, the
weather service warned.
Winds
that hit 70 mph on the higher peaks Sunday night combined with
parched air to spread flames across thousands of acres in Napa,
Sonoma and other counties. Last year’s rains created a bumper crop
of grass and brush after five years of drought, turning acres of land
into kindling.
“Fire
literally exploded and raced along the landscape,” the weather
service said in a bulletin published Monday.
It’s
unusual to have such extreme fire weather at night, said UC Berkeley
Professor Scott Stephens, who specializes in fire science.
Temperatures typically drop after sunset. That makes the land more
moist, because cold air holds less water.
But
that has changed somewhat in California over the past 15 years,
Stephens said. Overnight lows are rising, so the air stays drier
after dusk. One result, he said, is that night fires are much more
common.
On
Sunday night, the humidity hovered around 15 percent in the North
Bay, Stephens said — far lower than the 50 to 60 percent norm.
High
pressure in the Great Basin and low pressure on the coast created a
gradient that drove strong Diablo winds from inland areas, similar to
the ones that stoked the Oakland hills fire in 1991, said Neil
Lareau, an assistant professor of meteorology at San Jose State
University.
With
the Tubbs Fire, gusts drove the flames from near Calistoga to Santa
Rosa, a distance of 12 miles, in about three hours. Hundreds of homes
were destroyed in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park and Fountaingrove
neighborhoods.
“When
embers land on people’s roofs, they can ignite leaves in the
gutters” and set the house ablaze, Lareau said. That, in turn,
sends more embers wafting through the wind.
Smoke
and particulates from the Wine Country fires billowed for miles on
Monday and Tuesday, prompting the Bay Area Air Quality Management
District to issue advisories for residents throughout the region.
The
San Francisco Unified School District kept students indoors during
lunch, recess and P.E., and Mayor Ed Lee encouraged residents to seek
respite in four of the city’s public libraries — Civic Center,
Chinatown, Mission Bay and Glen Park — which have air filtration
systems.
The
air district will probably send out advisories again Wednesday, said
district spokesman Tom Flannigan.
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