Opinion: Federal agencies should disclose number of firefighters hospitalized with coronavirus
The U.S. Forest Service and the four land management agencies in the Department of the Interior have refused to disclose how many of their firefighting personnel have been hospitalized due to the coronavirus.
West Coast Wildfires: “California Is Built To Burn"
The sky over California is reddish brown. An army of nearly 20,000 firefighters has been battling against wildfires that have already charred over 3 million acres, destroyed over 6,000 houses and driven thousands of residents to flee. How could this happen?
Amid COVID and Wildfires, Farmworkers Have Been Pushed to the Brink
We’ve seen this before — in 2018, when farmworkers in California labored as fires raged in the background, contaminating the air and creating inhospitable work conditions.
Catastrophic wildfires, corporate air pollution, and COVID-19: A collision of crises
Devastating wildfires that have broken out across the western United States, particularly in California, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, which at latest count have claimed 33 lives and 4.6 million acres of land, are increasingly creating the potential for three major crises to collide: wildfires, air pollution and the coronavirus pandemic.
Thousands of wildfire evacuees present a public health challenge amid pandemic
SALEM, Ore. — Fearing one disaster will feed another, relief groups are putting some people who fled their homes during West Coast wildfires into hotels to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, stringing up shower curtains to separate people in group shelters and delivering box lunches instead of setting up buffets.
In California, the future is now. It’s grim
We knew this compounded misery could happen in California, but an apocalyptic August filled with rolling blackouts, triple-digit heat, epic lightning storms and coronavirus surge, stirs disbelief. Now the state is on fire. At this point, all we need is an earthquake.
The West is burning, so California struggles to find help fighting its wildfires
A June memo from the U.S. Forest Service Chief stressed the policy and put it in the pandemic context, as a strategy to put fires out quickly to limit crews’ exposure to COVID-19 while in the field. That has meant crews are busy on almost every fire, even those that might be observed and allowed to burn. To Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of the Oregon-based group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, it’s a misguided approach. “It’s not humanly possible to put out all fires,” he said. “We need to focus on the fires that really matter, to save lives and homes, and shift resources to them. The future is to safely manage wildfires, to steer them. You don’t need hundreds of firefighters to do that.”
They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?
“The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load. You won’t find any climate deniers on the fire line.”
Is it the Apocalypse? No, but it feels like it.
It’s been challenging for me to think about how to start this newsletter, because things are changing every day, and this is a humble newsletter and not a news organization, and I have a whole job and also am painting my room and things have been so busy. But whenever I glance at the news, my heart breaks for California.
Hey, California: With wildfires, blackouts, bloody protests, pandemic, could 2020 get any worse?
Historic wildfires. Frantic evacuations. Punishing heat waves. The first rolling blackouts in two decades. And that was just this past week.
In lightning-struck California, the smoke is now scarier than the pandemic
Oakland, California — A wildfire pollution sky is the color of dirty porcelain and it glares, so your eyes hurt even before you look up. It’s the smell that really gets you, though. That and the sour scrape in your throat. From my house in Oakland we can’t quite see the nearest fires—we scan the horizon for them, obsessively, but so far this week we see fire only in the photos and videos coming at us nonstop. Fat black plumes. Burning fields. House walls, county roads, children’s play structures, all engulfed in flames.
'Severe inhumanity': California prisons overwhelmed by Covid outbreaks and approaching fires
California’s raging wildfires have created a crisis at multiple state prisons, where there are reports of heavy smoke and ash making it hard to breathe, unanswered pleas for evacuation, and concerns that the fire response could lead to further Covid-19 spread.
COVID Plans Put to Test as Firefighters Crowd Camps for Peak Wildfire Season
HELENA, Mont. — Jon Paul was leery entering his first wildfire camp of the year late last month to fight three lightning-caused fires scorching parts of a Northern California forest that hadn’t burned in 40 years.
More than half of California's incarcerated firefighters are under lockdown as coronavirus sweeps through state prisons, resulting in a shortage of crews in fire season
As more than 360 fires burn across the state of California, the coronavirus pandemic is creating a shortage of inmate fire crews to battle the wildfires.
COVID-19 Could Threaten Firefighters as Wildfire Season Ramps Up
Paul is one of thousands of firefighters from across the U.S. battling dozens of wildfires burning throughout the West. It’s an inherently dangerous job that now carries the additional risk of COVID-19 transmission. Any outbreak that ripples through a camp could easily sideline crews and spread the virus across multiple fires—and back to communities across the country—as personnel transfer in and out of “hot zones” and return home. Though most firefighters are young and fit, some will inevitably fall ill in these remote makeshift communities of shared showers and portable toilets, where medical care can be limited. The pollutants in the smoke they breathe daily also make them more susceptible to COVID-19 and can worsen the effects of the disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
How many wildland firefighters have COVID-19? Some agencies won’t, or can’t, say.
Wildland firefighter Alexandru Oarcea fought fires in Arizona with his 20-person crew for four months this season. He faced three of the biggest wildfires in the state’s history, all of which required hundreds of firefighting personnel to contain, and fought fires on the Navajo Nation, which had the highest per-capita coronavirus infection rate in the U.S. in May. Last week, his unit traveled to northern California, where peak fire season is just getting started. He’s now at a fire camp — makeshift cities that serve as bases for hundreds or even thousands of firefighters working to contain large blazes — on a fire that spans more than 80,000 acres. “Insanely crowded camp even for a normal season,” he texted me earlier this week. “This place is gonna turn into a covid nightmare!”
Forest Service firefighters face COVID-19 risks
GREENWIRE | Forest Service fire and aviation crews are seeing an uptick in coronavirus cases as the wildfire season progresses, according to agency officials.
The latest tally is around 200 positive test results, Fire and Aviation Director Patty Grantham told Forest Service retirees this week. Just under half of those are directly involved in firefighting, she said.
Wildland Firefighters are Getting Covid. Many Don’t Have Health Insurance.
For four years, I worked as a hotshot, an elite wildland firefighter. Hotshots are crews of 18–22 initial attack firefighters, often the first to arrive on fires and charged with working closest to the flames. They typically work over a thousand hours of overtime each summer. Training is rigorous, and the job is grueling.
Arizona wildfires and COVID-19: Firefighters are fighting two battles
For the men and women fighting Arizona wildfires this summer, amidst a pandemic, almost every aspect of day-to-day life has changed drastically.