Smoke From Two Fires: Meyers and Walbridge
My husband and I live in a rural area of Sonoma County, wine country north of San Francisco, that is currently on warning to evacuate. Our bags are packed and we wait and hope.
Sonoma County initially had a pretty good handle on COVID-19. Not so much, anymore. People are getting picked off by the virus in our nursing homes. Our daily cases are exploding, much of it among our Hispanic residents.
Local public health officials are doing everything they can, despite being undermined by our local sheriff, one of those yahoos who decided he knew better than the Public Health Officer early on and refused to enforce the local order. We didn’t have very many cases at the time, and he just thought it didn’t make sense. Now that cases have exploded, he has been pretty quiet on that front. But he has tried to publicly challenge the supervisors for the across the board cuts affecting his department, and for putting a measure on November’s ballot for better oversight of his department.
Where I live usually gets fog traveling up a valley from the coast while it is hot inland. Not so much these days. But we are still cooler than inland. When the rolling blackouts started, we still had enough energy in our Tesla battery to run window fans. But now that the fires are here, we have to keep the windows shut because the air is so bad. And where we live, it has only gotten into the mid 90s, not the 105+ temperatures of inland.
I saw a comment on a piece about the Mother Jones article suggesting everyone in California should have a bag packed. The author might have had a point about it being political hyperbole if they hadn’t basically said—Well, at least most of the lightening strikes are hitting low population areas. You’re not from around here, are you?
The north bay lightening fires did start in mostly isolated areas. A paragraph posted on Facebook by my local supervisor, Lynda Hopkins, puts this in context:
When I visited the fire yesterday, a firefighter friend noted that while Sonoma County is accustomed to large blazes, this is the first time in many decades that we have experienced a substantial fire *IN HEAVY TIMBER*. That makes this fire very different from 2017 and 2019. We are dealing with densely forested areas that can burn for weeks; we are dealing with the sort of fire that can fling embercast far even in lighter winds; and the sort of landscape that can facilitate fires smoldering, unobserved, in a downed tree or the roots of a tree stump for days before igniting into a larger blaze. As Baxman said, you might not see the full results of the lightning strikes until days after the storm.
Heavily populated areas have already been hit by the Hennessy fire, which jumped the 80 freeway and is resulting in mass evacuations.
Locally, the evacuation centers have started taking evacuees in, checking temperatures and asking about symptoms. They had a plan, you see? An alternate evacuation site in Healdsburg for evacuees that do or might have COVID-19. Healdsburg is now on evacuation warning because a wind shift placed it in the crosshairs of the Walbridge fire. I don’t know how the disaster planners in this county don’t just lay down on the ground and start crying.
They keep going. We all keep going—I mean, what else are we going to do? My husband and I are among the lucky ones. We have a place to go in Berkeley, where we can bring our cats as long as we keep them crated so they don’t claw the furniture like they did last year when we were evacuated. We are lucky enough to have solar panels and limited back up electricity. We are fortunate enough to have been able to invest tens of thousands of dollars in creating defensible space around our house.
The housing prices are high here, but not everybody out here is rich. There are plenty of aging hippies who bought cheap in the 70s and 80s who don’t have the backs or the bucks to do the work. There is a lot of emphasis on defensible space out here. You can even get an inspector to come out for free to look at your property. It used to be only the state was available for these inspections. Your reward for being a good citizen and having them out was to be put on notice to make the changes they recommended in a month or get fined. Through locals working together, there is now Fire Safe Sonoma to do the inspections. They offer advice, and possibly access to grants, instead of fines. So much more of this is needed.
Climate change isn’t coming. It’s here. We need massive, comprehensive investment in mitigating further damage. We need massive, comprehensive investment in mitigating the damage from natural disasters. Whether it’s grants to help with sea level rise and increased hurricanes, forest management, grants rather than just pamphlets to help create defensible space in the rural fire zones. Rural fires send out babies in the wind. We are all connected in this.
Vice President Biden, are you listening? Don’t worry, you and Senator Harris have my vote, no question about that. My husband and I are involved enough that we watched the first night of the convention in its entirety, but we have been a bit distracted since then.
Are you listening? Because a massive paradigm shift is necessary to meet the challenge of climate change and the accompanying multiple, exponentially increasing disasters, unfolding in real time. Massive, comprehensive investment is needed on so many different fronts. Think big. We aren’t going to make it otherwise.
