Diary of a Smoke Refugee
It’s been quite a week here in Oregon. I know there are plenty of other horrors happening in the world. The invisible ones are the worst. Like tens of millions of children in the US going to bed hungry every night in recent weeks, or the tap water in Flint and Gaza continuing to be undrinkable, or the many people every night in Yemen and India dying alone at home of disease, knowing it’s pointless to go to a hospital that has no medicine and no equipment. The visible horrors are more dramatic, more newsworthy, and also deadly for some, devastating for many – Sudan and Alabama underwater. Siberia, California, and Oregon on fire.
What the Photos of Wildfires and Smoke Don’t Show You
Over the past few weeks, the West erupted in flames. The lucky among us know this from the news: 3.2 million acres burned in California, 1 million acres burned in Oregon, more than 900,000 acres burned in Washington. Words often fail as those words just failed — to communicate what these fires are actually like up close. Photographs often do better at capturing the drama and emotion. But the pictures that run in news outlets represent a tiny subset of what happens during a wildfire. What we see, and don’t see, shapes what we think about fire. And what we think about fire shapes fire policy. And as the West Coast learned these past few weeks, our fire management policy has left us in a very dangerous place.
How an Oregon Wildfire Became One of the Most Destructive
The Almeda fire left a path of destruction as it tore through the Rogue Valley in southern Oregon. About 24 hours after it started, an estimated 2,350 homes had been left in ashes. We used satellite images, videos and social media posts to track what happened.
Senators Wyden, Manchin, Cantwell introduce legislation to help prevent catastrophic wildfires
U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., today introduced legislation to help prevent the blistering and destructive infernos destroying homes, businesses and livelihoods and becoming all too common as the climate crisis grows.
Amid Record-Breaking Fires, Debate Over Blame
Between 2001 and 2010, wildfires burned a total of 7.03 million acres in California, according to a recent analysis published in The Los Angeles Times.
In 2020 alone, fires have already burned 3.2 million acres, destroying buildings, breaking records, and killing at least 25 people in the state. The largest of these fires, the August Complex, has already consumed an area bigger than the state of Rhode Island. And the blazes aren’t done yet: Twenty-six major wildfires are currently burning in California.
Fighting fire with fire
"More people means more pressure to suppress wildfires early and often to protect homes, and more barriers to the kind of regular prescribed burning that many parts of California needs," says Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology.
What factors contribute to deadly wildfires and how should they be managed?
According to the Los Angeles Times, fires are burning more populated areas and damage is increasing. Fire officials blame everything from lightning storms, development in fire prone areas, land management, fire suppression, and climate change. Prior to the colonization of the West, Indigenous tribes burned more than four million acres a year. What will it take to change the way fires are managed in the coming years?
Paper maps, two-way radios: how firefighting tech is stuck in the past.
The scale of the fires and the rate at which they burn make them more dangerous than ever, said Ingalsbee, who has been working with wildfires since the 1980s. “The scale of activity and the incredible speed at which these fires are spreading is beyond what anyone alive today has ever experienced,” he said. “It is clear that this is climate change. The future is now.”
Climate change focus obscures complexities of wildfires
Timothy Ingalsbee, a wildland firefighter and executive director of the Eugene, Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, said “the science is pretty clear there’s no single cause of what’s going on,” though he sees climate change as the primary driver. “It’s why we’ve seen so many big fires on land simultaneously,” he said. “But it’s also an issue of forest management. Not the lack of forest management, but the legacy of forest management.”
Logging will do nothing to help us out of this mess
As I write this, my hometown of Talent, Oregon is a disaster area, and I am in tears over the destruction of my neighborhood. Lives have been forever changed by this tragedy that could have been avoided with better planning.
The Big Smoke
Oakland, California—On Tuesday, September 8, my husband and I were hiking along Pelican Bluffs Trail near Gualala, a tiny coastal town in Northern California’s Mendocino County, to which we’d come to escape from the heat and the wildfire smoke already plaguing the Bay Area. It was a dramatic walk, with views of white cliffs, pristine beaches, and the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, whose intense blue was rivaled only by the skies above it. As a flight of pelicans vanished into the patch of ocean fog, I reminded myself of how lucky I was: seventeen years into my life in the great state of California, it still felt as if I’d barely scratched the surface. Then I glanced up and noticed a gray halo around the suddenly orange sun. It’s just sea fog, my husband told me; it doesn’t get smoky on the coast. The nearest fire, which had erupted over Labor Day at Willits, where we’d been planning a ride on the Skunk Train through the redwoods, was an hour and a half away—surely too far to cause this.
Suppressing fires has failed. Here’s what California needs to do instead.
Five of California's 10 largest fires in modern history are all burning at once. Together, this year's wildfires have already destroyed 4,200 buildings, forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes, and scorched more than 3.2 million acres across the state.
Smoke from West Coast wildfires reaches Europe
“More crews, more air tankers, more engines and dozers still can’t overcome this powerful force of nature,” said Tim Ingalsbee, a member of the advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “The crews are beat up and fatigued and spread thin, and we’re barely halfway through the traditional fire season.”
‘Nothing left in the bucket’: Wildfire resources run thin
With no end in sight to the pandemic, some worry the focus on aggressively attacking every fire could last. Allowing instead for more fires to burn if they are not threatening life or property would free up firefighters for the most dangerous blazes, said Tim Ingalsbee with the advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology.
Firestorm in the West: A deep look with fire ecologist Tim Ingalsbee
Climate change, forest management, the "rural-urban interface," and much more
Wildfire resources run thin as firefighters struggle to ‘contain one before another erupts’
Justin Silvera came off the fire lines in Northern California after a grueling 36 straight days battling wildfires and evacuating residents ahead of the flames. Before that, he and his crew had worked for 20 days, followed by a three-day break.
Wildfires Burning in Heavily Clearcut, Logged and Roaded Parts of the Oregon Cascades
As many of us know, different ecosystems burn differently. High severity fires are natural, normal and expected in some ecosystems, not so much in others. It’s important to remember that many of the largest and most destructive wildfires in recent years—in terms of human lives and structures lost—were not even “forest” fires at all, but rather more urban fires that raced through neighborhoods and communities surrounded by dry grass, brush, shrubs, and chaparral. Many of these fires also had little to do with federal public lands. However, all of these deadly fires have been pushed by heavy winds during a period of prolonged drought and record high temperatures.
Our land was taken. But we still hold the knowledge of how to stop mega-fires
As wildfires rage across California, it saddens me that Indigenous peoples’ millennia-long practice of cultural burning has been ignored in favor of fire suppression.