What can we count on the GOP to deliver?
Here’s a couple of things:
Inaction in the face of climate change.
Refusal to regulate vital industries.
I haven’t got confirmation from the ground yet, but the latest fire maps leave little room for doubt. The Dixie Fire exploded yesterday, burning through the mountain town of Greenville, surrounding the next place up the road, Chester, and pushing north into the Warner Valley and the southeast corner of Lassen Volcanic National Park.
So, be warned: all this may be of interest to no one but myself. If that’s the story for you, just read on by…
My family owns two little cabins in the Warner Valley, our plot bordering on two sides on the park itself. They’re nothing special–one is a 20×24 ft. single room (plus bathroom) with a murphy bed in the corner. That was the one my mum built as her personal shelter; the other, larger, was the family cabin of my childhood. Built in 1964, it too was basically a single room: the three bunkrooms and the room my parents used were separated by partitions, not floor-to-ceiling and noise proof walls.
No, I still don’t know what mom and dad were thinking.
Now they are almost certainly gone. The latest fire maps show the leading edge of hot burn well up the valley from our cabins. That means all our neighbors places are gone too.
This wasn’t a zillionaires’ retreat, btw. The Warner Valley is a strictly seasonal destination. No one ploughs the road, and there are a half dozen or so little clusters of cabins in the area that no one can get to from roughly November to May. It’s hella remote–5 hours or so from the Bay Area, with minor roads for the last bit of the journey. It’s the kind of place folks in Chico build what folks in Maine call a camp to escape the summer heat at lower altitudes. It is, or was, just a gorgeous stretch of mountain country that extended-locals and a few of us lucky outlanders got to enjoy.
I spent every summer there growing up, and every year since I was about 30 I, and soon my own family, would spend a week or so there. Totally off grid: cell phone service didn’t reach our corner of the valley; there was no town electricity, and for the last few years we gave up on our generator; no internet, of course. Paradise in other words.
And now it’s gone. I suppose I can still hope for one of those fire miracles, but realistically, the structures are tucked up against the base of a really steep slope (Mt. Harkness, at whose summit fire lookout tower Edward Abbey completed Desert Solitaire) and are surrounded by large and bone dry trees. The immediate ground around the two buildings is bare and clear…but it won’t take many embers to do the job. Dammit.
The Dixie Fire is the product of two American political tendencies. The first has been to ignore climate change, an core plank of Republican posturing for two decades. That part of the world is in the second year of one of the deepest droughts on record. There is essentially no residual moisture in the soil, plants or air. Temperatures have been high, humidity during the fire has often dropped into single digits, which combined with the wind patterns has produced what are called “red flag” fire conditions several times in the three weeks and counting the Dixie Fire has burned, including yesterday and today, when the blaze burst past the containment plans that aimed to hold it off the north side of Lake Almanor, Chester, and the national park. That red flag status will hold until at least tonight.
On the parochial level, the one that has me torn up right now, there really was nothing to do once the fire did jump that line: there’s only one small road into Warner Valley, so fire crews couldn’t safely get ahead of its front edge. It will keep on going until it hits the next plausible defensive position or the weather and winds change dramatically.
Globally, this is the new normal. Climate change is not a theoretical exercise anymore. It hasn’t been for years. What’s changed is how obvious and widespread the signal and the harm has become. Fire season in the west used to be an autumn thing, the tail end of the gap between the end of the spring snow and rain and the resumption of the wet season in the fall. Now it starts in June, sometimes earlier, strikes more widely, costs more, and imposes so much more loss. The GOP’s success in blocking any meaningful response, from carbon reductions to the construction of infrastructure capable of withstanding the shifts we know are coming, are here, is directly implicated in what’s happening all over the Mountain and Pacific states this year, just as they were in the Texas freeze and power massacre, the floods and so on. And they’re damn well responsible–in part and indirectly, but responsible–for my personal loss, those two little repository of the memories of the happiest days of my life.
So yeah, I fucking hate Republicans for their willed stupidity in the face of a global, existential crisis.
Add to that this factoid. Some of you may recall that a faulty power line owned by the power company, PG & E, sparked the Camp Fire, which in November 2018 destroyed the town of Paradise, California, killing at least 85. PG&E filed for bankruptcy two months later, citing anticipated fire liability losses. In December, the company pled guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. It ultimately settled with victims, promising to pay $13.5 billion, in stock in the reorganized company.
Fast forward to today. No investigations are complete yet, understandably, but PG&E is implicated in both the Dixie Fire’s start–it seems it didn’t maintain its power line routes well enough, and a falling tree may have knocked down a section–and the company has already suggested that its equipment may have caused the Fly Fire, which started on its own but later merged with the larger blaze.
PG&E has a reputation for being a crappy company. It’s able to be so because the American approach to corporate oversight is to avoid it–a stance that is as near a tablets-from-the-mountains pillar of modern Republican politics. There’s no reason PG&E should exist in any form at this point: its assets should have been sold after the Camp Fire to satisfy its victims, the taxpayers on the hook for the fire response and cleanup, and any other creditors. Its functions should have been taken up a new/other power companies–and yeah, the entire sector needs to be closely regulated with on-the-ground enforcement so they don’t forget to do the basics, like trim trees that can knock down high voltage lines. If corporations are people, then when they commit serious enough misdeeds they should face the corporate analogue to the death penalty.
But our Republican market fundamentalists/privatize-profit-socialize-risk asshole “betters” have not permitted anything like that stringency, and will go to the mattresses now to prevent it.
I look forward to selling my shares of re-re-organized PG&E stock the second that judgment hits my account. Fuck them and fuck the GOP that allows its monied masters to wreak such misery on its way to the last extractable dollar.
And yeah. This post is a way of putting some of my grief outside my head. I can’t convey in words what this place has meant to me over each of the seven decades of my life. To my whole family.
To be real: I’m grateful for these memories. No one has died so far in this fire, a record I devoutly hope continues. This isn’t my home; I have a roof over my head tonight and comfortable bed to sleep on, with my son and spouse safe with me. My three siblings and I can and probably will rebuild, and its a certainty that when/if we do so the new cabin will be vastly more comfortable than the beloved lost building born of mom and dad’s genuinely odd choices. In time, the forests will come back.
But damn. This is a bad day. And yeah. I blame the GOP assholes who do their best to ensure we can’t have nice things.
I’m not going to let those fuckers have the last word. Have some more images of that part of the world, taken in much better times. I know some of the Jackals are familiar with the area. I hope these bring back some good memories for you as well.
This is one of the Sifford Lakes on Flatiron Ridge, which forms one of the walls of the Warner Valley. There’s no trail to this little snowmelt pond. You have to know it’s there.
And here’s Mt. Shasta, photographed from Inspiration Point, above Lake Juniper.
Last one. This is the view from Lee Meadow in the Warner Valley. When I was a kid, this was still a working cattle ranch, summer pasture for the herd. Now all that’s left is the scraps of the old corral in the foreground. Scorched earth now, almost certainly, but that doesn’t take away the recollection of the joy on every first Saturday in July, when the station wagon would take the turn at the corral and we’d know the cabin was only 500 yards further down the road. Summer began here:
Talk about this sad story, or anything else. The thread: it is open.
Alison Carey
So sorry from Southern Oregon. (And apparently a college classmate?) Here in Ashland we can’t see our mountains anymore and it is both metaphor and fact. We are causing nature to disappear, and yes, fuck Republicans and their homicidal/suicidal plans and values.
Elizabelle
I’m sorry, Tom. I hope you do rebuild. But the irreplaceable is lost. The little towns, the wildlife, all the living things in fire’s path.
Lovely photos. I feel cooler just looking at them.
We have to do better. So much on our plate.
dlwchico
My family moved to Paradise in the mid-80’s. My dad was retired from the army and working at the post office. He came from dirt poor people back in Indiana and his dream had always been to build his own house. He got his GED in the army and went to community college to study construction stuff and in Magalia he got to build his house.
He designed it himself and then paid an engineer to look over the blueprints and sign off on it.
We built it all ourselves, except the ceiling joists. It was on the side of a hill and I spent a lot of time out there digging footers with a shovel when I was younger.
My parents lived there about 10 years till my dad retired completely and then they moved down to Chico.
I always had it in the back of my mind to one day try and buy back that house just because.
It burned down during the Camp fire.
Kelly
There’s a lot to be sad about. Another little town burned up, Greenville, CA. Month ago Litton BC. Seems we lose some towns to wildfire every year. Several lightning fires nearby in the Oregon Cascades. Like last years Beachie fire that torched much of my neighborhood last September they are on ground that’s tough to defend so they’ll be a threat to our home until the rains this fall. The Beachie fire went from a fire 30 miles away to burning down 10 homes in my neighborhood and a couple nearby towns in one windy night. This years fires are 40 miles away. A lot of smoke this week. Kinda edgy about it.
Six of my nine grandchildren are under 12. Sure hope they can be vaccinated soon. Kinda edgy about that to.
Douglas firs are the iconic tree of western Oregon. The Great Heat Dome of June 2021 scorched many of the needles off of the south and west sides of Doug firs. Will it happen again? Will it happen often? How long can these iconic native trees survive around here? Another thing to be edgy about.
Edgy about who counts votes in years to come. Another thing that we’ll be dealing with long term.
My sympathy for your likely loss of a treasured place.
terraformer
So sorry to hear that, Tom. It looks like an amazingly beautiful place! Here’s hoping you get lucky and the fires somehow bypassed this idyllic spot; failing that, that you find another place to call your own and hand down to your family.
Albatrossity
That is achingly beautiful country. Thanks for the images, and my condolences on the losses.
Yeah, I hate Republicans too. They have screwed this country over so bad that there is no way to come back and truly MAGA. Not happening, alas
laura
The anthropocene is not good for children and other living things.
So sorry for the wanton loss of your property and sanctuary.
trollhattan
So sorry Tom, and hoping against hope you’re wrong about losing the cabins. Have mentioned before I’ve camped, hiked and snowshoed the area and appreciate its remoteness and beauty, the least-known corner of the state. Was just grumbling after learning in the last hour Lassen Park is closed.
You’ll surely take comfort knowing Doug LaMalfa feels bad. He’ll doubtless return to Washington and help fix things.
I’ve run out of things to say about PG&E. Since San Bruno they have continued cratering with vigor. And people keep dying and bonuses continue to be distributed. If it weren’t for their ownership I might be questioning closing Diablo Canyon. But nope, close it before you break it.
Again, sorry.
Betsy
I’m super sorry. And I’m partly super sorry because my family has its own little story of loss due to Republicans.
I’m super sorry for you, and for all of us here.
It doesn’t really help regain any corner of your precious paradise, and what a paradise I know it was, but I’m super sorry.
trollhattan
@dlwchico:
The speed of the Camp Fire was mindboggling. By the time most learned of its existance, the town was already gone.
Last year a second fire started in the same Feather River Canyon and burned out to the south, consuming the part unharmed in the Camp Fire. It burned right to the now-repaired Oroville Dam Spillway.
Kelly
Mrs Kelly sorted her Go Bag today.
dlwchico
@trollhattan: That only 85 people died is mind blowing.
WaterGirl
So sorry to hear this, Tom. I am in tears. Needless loss in a beautiful area.
Another Scott
Thank you for sharing this. I’m very sorry for the heartache this is causing you and your family and the folks out there.
It’s another example of how good it is that we have Biden-Harris in the White House. They are actually doing things about wildfire now, unlike TFG.
Hang in there.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@Kelly: I read that and thought “not again”. And it’s not even affecting me personally; I just read about it.
The struggle is real, and it wears you down.
mrmoshpotato
The GOP is why we can’t have nice things.
Sorry for you loss, Tom. Wilderness areas like that are good for the soul.
trollhattan
Open thread privilege–poked fun at open water distance swimming as a viewer experience but now find it’s worlds above the 50 km race walk.
Tom Levenson
@trollhattan: Excellent use of the privilege.
raven
@dlwchico: My friends live there as well. I talked to him a but a week after they lost there house and it left me shaken. This dude was in the 101st ABN in Vietnam so he was no stranger to trauma. He talked for about 30 minutes without stopping and ended it by saying they were trapped when they tried to drive out in separate cars and they got in one so they could die together . The have rebuilt and I haven’t heard from them yet.
eta They have to know each other.
Ohio Mom
What a loss. It stinks. You are robbed of what you thought was your future, all the time you were going to continue to enjoy being at that little homestead.
I hate Republicans too, for all sorts of reasons, too numerous to list in a sympathy comment.
raven
@WaterGirl: The people I am talking about in Paradise worked at the Institute for Child Behavior and Development. I’m sure it has a different name now.
Princess Leia
Irreplaceable loss on so many levels. My heart is broken for you and so many. And especially for the innocent wild life and plants who were killed for no damn reason except greed, stupidity and meanness.
Prometheus Shrugged
@trollhattan: I saw this statement this morning and have been infuriated all day as a result. Talk about malevolent morons (a steady theme this week at Balloon Juice). It’s grating to think that the stewardship of some of the most beautiful spots on Earth has been ceded to people like.
Martin
I give PG&E a little more slack. They serve an area that has a large amount of federal land, land that is understaffed by the forest service. The feds are almost completely unable to fight fires on federal land and rely on CA taxpayers to perform that service. This also has implications for PG&E in terms of servicing their equipment on federal land, and getting the permits needed to bury transmission lines.
This austerity in favor of tax cuts is just a different flavor of GOP harm, but it also means that PG&E is having a harder time of doing this than they should.
That said, PG&E needs to be converted to a public utility. We need to have a come to jesus talk with the US dept of the interior to figure out some mechanisms that they can participate in ensuring that fires started on federal lands can at least sometimes be knocked down before they turn into conflagrations. I don’t care if they cut CA a check and just expand CalFire, but something needs to be done.
Maybe the infrastructure bill can include some money carved out to bury transmission lines on federal land. Seems like it would be a net savings compared to firefighting efforts.
Kelly
@Another Scott: From your link
I hope we transition to a large, full time, full benefits federal fire fighter staff. There is much fuel reduction work that can be done by the fire crews in the off season.
E.
Greetings from across the (Central) valley and a couple miles north. The smoke is so thick you can look directly at the sun and what is usually the busiest time of year for my business (bakery) is completely, 100 percent dead. For the second year in a row. The Pacific Crest Trail, which is the cause of the busyness, is essentially on fire in a few different places. There are no hikers here now.
Everyone here is blaming the environmentalists and pot growers for this of course, and the new hashtag they love is “#manmadedrought” because you see the problem is Hmong dope growers are stealing all the water that used to be in our reservoirs and rivers. The very worst example of this idiotic theme being amplified is this CNN article. A secondary reason is we don’t have enough dams or enough clearcuts. Climate change is mocked.
People are losing their shite around here, looking for people to blame. PG&E deserves a lot of that for sure but come on, the planet is on fire. And Tom, you could have reduced the fuels around those cabins. Maybe you did. A lot of those who did still have cabins left. About 100 percent of those who did not, do not.
MomSense
In many ways our experience of COVID is like a condensed version of climate change. I remember almost 35 years ago working on the amendments to the Clean Air Act and how long and difficult that fight was. Scientific American did a whole magazine about the devastation of global warming and warning we needed to act. And then I watched as industry groups and media completely distorted the reality and the scientific consensus. Just like the deaths from COVID and this wave that’s been fueled by disinformation and cynical politicians and media personalities. Furious and sad don’t capture the depth of what I feel. It’s a deep anguish.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Elizabelle
@Martin: At least we have an administration that is not disinterested, nor hidebound. Maybe they’re looking at that already.
@Kelly: Very true. Include in the duties “raking the forest” to induce some Republican support.
JustRuss
Several fires are burning in western Oregon. Skies here are hazy, and just got notice that winds are expected to shift next week and blow a lot more smoke our way, and we’ll see another heat wave about the same time. Awesome. Summers used to be great here, now not so much.
E.
@Martin:
@Martin:
The Forest Service fights fires on Forest Service lands; CALFIRE is for private lands. The Forest Service has an enormous, huge, presence on these fires. And the problem is not that they don’t get put out fast enough, it’s that it is not possible to put them out fast enough. The planet has warmed and these forests have had aggressive fire suppression for a century. Of course they will burn. The answer is not more aggressive suppression, it’s expensive actions done in the increasingly short off season. Like setting fires on purpose to reduce the fine fuels. But no one has the stomach for that because of risk/smoke/anger that they aren’t logging instead.
Kelly
@WaterGirl: The Beachie fire blew up due to unprecedented hurricane force, super dry, east wind. If the wind is kind we’ll be all right. The Beachie fire accomplished a LOT of fuel reduction so we have that going for us.
PigDog
We should name the fires after GOP politicians.
Betty Cracker
Man, that sucks. I’m sorry.
mvr
I’m so sorry. It is really hard losing something near and dear with personal history and connections, even if you can rebuild something. I’d be beside myself.
Elizabelle
@E.: I hope that you and your bakery can hang on
We should indeed.
Mike in NC
Just finished reading “Frankly, We Did Win This Election” by Michael C. Bender. Very well written. He begins with a portrait of several pathetic losers who invested a great deal of time and money in attending Trump’s ugly hate rallies. Some went to 20 or 30 of them, and even witnessed the assault on the Capitol building in January by the fascist mob of Trumpanzees.
namekarB
The Warner Valley is one of the best kept open secrets in California.
#1 Son and DIL place is within the evac zone of the River fire downslope from Colfax. Fingers crossed that it survives. When the power was cut off, the well pump stopped so they could no longer wet things down. They abandoned the place this morning. Old house with a shake roof. They were planning on putting a metal roof over the top but ran out of time
VeniceRiley
I think I read this back in 2015 and also saw a youtube on it. But California needed to get moving on a couple hundred or so of these back then. We would have our water problem solved already.
https://fortune.com/2015/10/29/water-desalination-stage-2-innovations-manoj-bhargava
Ah here is the youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inG9YP_xhVA
Old School
Sorry for your loss. It looks like an absolutely wonderful place.
Flea, RN
There’s a much smaller fire, the River Fire, burning about 10 miles down canyon from the house that my family has shared for 6 generations. I feel sick to my stomach, not just for myself, but for my mom, her great grandchildren, and so many people (and all my relations), the born and the yet-to-be-born, who are suffering such an incalculable loss. Not only the tangible things – lives and property, but memories, and the promise of wild places.
If I feel sorry for the greedy, myopic souls you reference in your piece, Tom, it’s because they don’t have the eyes to see what is passing. My heart breaks for you, brother.
namekarB
@Flea, RN: There is hope. They are using Hwy 174 as a fire break on the north end of that fire. Lemme guess. Dutch Flat?
Poe Larity
Sorry for your probable loss. Lost a small timberframe and other structures in the Hennessey/LNU fire on some ag land. Finished the exterior of a replacement, all corrugated metal siding and roof this month. Too hot to work on until next month.
Presumably you have insurance with something larger. FEMA will probably pay for cleanup but it took 6 months in Napa for that offer so we cleaned up ourselves. Only a handful of people are rebuilding so far, long times for permits and builders are maxed out.
The thing with PG&E is the only option is state takeover. Not gonna do that. There is no way overhead lines in rural country can work if the new normal of 70mph winds and dry lightning causing 20 fires at a time.
Jay
@E.:
you might like this:
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/knowing-fire/
It’s been a horrible fire season here as well. Many places I have loved, have been burned over.
Mary G
@Martin: Maybe it’s changed in the last few years, but one of my dearest friends is married to a now-retired federal firefighter who was in charge of hiring a huge number of temps before fire season and brought back photos of massive efforts by feds to fight fire in the San Gabriels and other mountain ranges.
Martin
@E.: But the forest service also doesn’t have the staffing for it. Managed burns need to be carefully controlled. And yes, the offseason is short but there were only prescribed burns on 44,000 acres of federal land in CA last year – out of 33 million acres. The Dixie fire grew by more than that just last night.
We spend 10x as much on suppression than mitigation. $500M a year for prescribed burns – nationally. The Camp Fire had a cost of $16B. This is penny wise and pound foolish. They need to up the mitigation budget by a factor of 10 and hire up enough staff to pull it off.
Nicole
I’m so sorry.
Ugh. I think of Reagan tearing the solar panels off the White House, just to be a jerk. The Republicans have been setting up the current circumstances for decades.
Tracy
Oh boy. I could have written your post. I had a cabin at Mill Creek for 30 years. Best times of my life were spent up there— long summers with my kids, White Christmases, cuddling with our dogs, smelling the scent of cedar, proud Mt Lassen. Even though I left Chico and have lived in OR over a decade now, my heart will be empty if my former little cabin in that sacred forest goes up. I’m pretty sure I know how you feel. And I’m feeling that same way for all the people who have lost their special place on the planet. I used to roll my eyes a little when people in Mill Creek called it God’s Country. But reconsidering, I may not really believe in God but I most assuredly believe in God’s Country bc I’ve lived and breathed it .
Thanks for your post. I needed to read something like that. I read that some people refused to leave when ordered to evacuated and they threatened the firefighters with weapons. When I read that I thought anti-vaxxers, Q anon, the Big Lie and I thought how much I hate it when these Republicans (yes) think they are now entitled to do whatever the hell they want.
stay safe everyone. My heart is with you ❤️
Tom Levenson
@E.: Gee, thanks for that pre-emptive victim blaming.
I won’t use the vocabulary I’m thinking, beyond noting that the while our cabins are cleared of fuel on the one acre we own, there’s not a ton you can do when two sides of the rectangle are national park and a third is a state fish and wildlife refuge. The park starts literally 10-40 yards from our structures, and we can’t touch those trees.
So thanks a whole lot for your amazingly insightful post-hoc advice.
And yeah. I’m a little salty. I wonder why.
Martin
@Mary G: But that just illustrates my point. Why are they temps? They need to be staffed in the winter and spring to eliminate this fuel before it goes up in this manner.
This is the equivalent of asking for your vaccine when the RN comes in with the intubation tube.
West of the Rockies
Another Chico person here… I grew up in Paradise. Yeah, climate change is absolutely real. So sorry, Republicans, that this truth interrupts business and your shitty world view.
Also, I do not know how fires work, but next time there’s a fire near a Pacific Gas and Electric facility, let’s send four dozen trucks immediately, not one truck and a guy in a red SUV.
I suspect I am not being fair to fire fighters. I am sure my ignorance is showing. But I am absolutely feeling PTSD on the subject of fires on the west coast.
Tom Levenson
@Poe Larity: We’re insured. We have to hope our policy is with a company that can withstand the claims that will flow from this event, but the fact of it is that not this is a sparsely populated place so this is likely not to be a beyond-category loss.
It’s not the money, though. (Or rather, rebuilding money will help a lot, of course, but that’s not really the issue for the moment.)
Thanks for your thoughts.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
It’s not a good time to bring up Cuomo but here in NY , after an ice storm, he read the utility companies the riot act. They’ve been very proactive about maintaining the power lines since then. A large transmission line is adjacent to my land and they come by and remove anything that may affect it. They weren’t doing that before.
Tom Levenson
@Tracy: Thanks. The Mill Creek area is just stunning.
I heard on Twitter from someone else with a cabin in the valley that there may be a few hold outs who haven’t left.
Oy.
Citizen Alan
The scenery in those pictures is gorgeous. Which is why it all had to be burned. Republicans are like Medusa–so hideous that they hate and fear beauty in every form.
Meyerman
I went to UC Berkeley from 83 to 87, and lived in California much of the time until 1995. Spent a lot of time up in the mountains. From Mount Lassen all the way down to Mineral King. I’ve been back a bit a few times over the last decade. The transformation is terrible. Massive stands of dead and dying timber caused by drought. Huge fire scars starting at about the height where the forests began. I went back with my sons a couple of summers ago to show them Lake Tahoe and the northeast backcountry of Yosemite. The smoke over Tahoe was so thick that you couldn’t see the other side. Once we got over to the east side of the Sierras, we had to monitor the fires to see how we were going to get back. The forests that existed during the 20th century won’t be coming back, which is fine for the ones that were too dense due to fire suppression. But drought is hard on young trees, so I wonder whether the high Sierra will transition to more open grassland and oak like you find at lower elevations.
FlyingToaster
I’ll believe in corporate personhood the first time one gets executed.
And PG&E seems a prime candidate. (Though, honest to Dog, Bank of America or Wells Fargo or Chase would be nearly as satisfying).
Denali
So sorry for this heartbreaking loss, Tom.
trollhattan
@Martin:
Gov. Arnold had a grand proposal to add and staff a lot of CalFire stations–I remember because the company I worked at had a contract for design and construction and was in the process of staffing it–but the effort was spiked during the Great Recession.
At that time, there was an actual offseason for CalFire. It’s a measure of the acceleration of climate change that CalFire no longer has an offseason.
Tom Levenson
@Meyerman: The landscape will change.
Among the tragedies of this fire: one of the few substantial stands of never-logged old growth in the area got torched.
Tom Levenson
By the way: thanks to everyone for your good wishes and sympathy. I really appreciate the warmth and kindness.
Tracy
@Tom Levenson:
?
So nice to have a reply. I am currently in the Faroe Islands where it is 12:30am. Now I feel connected to CA and the sad goings on. Feels good tho.
Interstadial
@VeniceRiley: 80% of water use in California is by agriculture and our agriculture can’t afford the cost of desalinated water. If there isn’t enough water at competitive rates they’ll have to go back to dryland (non-irrigated) agriculture which was common in many of these areas in the late 19th century. Desalinization will help urban areas but it’s not a solution to drought.
Desalinated water does nothing at all for dried-up forests and mountain ranges, or for the resulting fires. You can’t economically water tens of millions of acres of landscape with pipelines, pumping stations, and sprinklers.
Martin
@Tom Levenson: You should have done what my dad’s new neighbor did. She just moved in and her property abuts a city park. She hired some folks (she’s disabled) to come in and clear vegetation from her yard so the chickens would have more room. She then proceeded to have them clear about ⅓ of the vegetation from the city park on the other side of her fence – an area about the size of her property.
My dad learned of this when city workers were pounding on her door. They asked if she hired someone to do that, she said yes. They asked why, she said she didn’t like how they were shading her yard. They asked how she thought she had the right to do that, and she said she was disabled. She wasn’t backing down.
Some other city folks came out a day or two later, along with police. She read them the riot act. There was also some issue with her chickens getting out. Which she blamed on her being disabled.
My dad isn’t sure if they have chosen to arrest her. I get the next installation on this saga next week.
Elizabelle
@Citizen Alan: I would say that Republicans may not necessarily “hate beauty”, but they sure don’t believe in the public good or protecting any environment that they do not personally exist within.
They are fantasists, who fantasize that there is a free market for everything. They are not burdened by ethics or compassion, either.
They are demolition agents. Extraction economy types.
Another case of projection: they were scoffing at Obama (“you didn’t build that”), when it is they who do not appreciate the many public services we already enjoy, care of earlier, more farsighted leaders and voters, which made creating their businesses [if not inheriting them] easier.
They are arsonists. They don’t build anything unless it is military-adjacent. Then: no price too high.
Although they sure are skimping on healthcare (physical and mental) for our active duty and veterans. Especially the veterans of more recent wars.
Aziz, light!
Retired Forest Service guy here. Adding to what E said above, the drought is the trigger; the ammunition is the fuel load, at levels way out of sync with the natural order because of 100+ years of fire suppression. The public demanded for all those years, that we, the land managers marching behind Smokey, put out every fire as quickly as possible, no matter how small or remote. A massive operation was erected to kill every burn with military precision.
Prevention of periodic ground fires allowed trees to grow more and more crowded while more and more down wood collected on the ground. When those excessive ground fuels ignite, they reach up into the canopy and spread the fire from crown to crown. Without those unnatural fuel loads, ground fires would burn through grasses and shrubs and seedlings but most mature trees would live to see another day.
Climate warming makes this picture worse by widening the growing season, thus producing more biomass, then drying it out more effectively.
They should have shot that little bear cub in New Mexico.
Scientists and fire managers know exactly what we need to do — use prescribed burns and forest thinning projects to reduce the fuel load. We can’t do either because the funding isn’t there for it, and because people have built their getaway homes up against every public forest boundary in the West, so that managers have no choice but to put the fires out to protect lives and property.
We call this the Era of Megafire. Barring mitigation measures on a massive scale, which taxpayers won’t support, these hotter, more extensive, and more frequent burns will be with us for generations.
trollhattan
Still more from PG&E. Couple weeks ago they changed their tune from “We couldn’t possibly afford to do that” to this.
At times like these I like to ponder the words of our “reasonable Republican senator with a conscience.”
“Corporations are people, my friend.”
At least he didn’t say “Corporations are friends, my people.”
Tom Levenson
@Martin: It’s a course of action.
Not obviously a great one, but still, a course.
Another Scott
It’s a problem in the eastern Mediterranean too…
Southern Europe wildfires: Which countries are affected?
https://p.dw.com/p/3yZgT
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
Tom Levenson
@Aziz, light!: I will say this: it wasn’t just the public. Forest Service leadership and their higher ups at the Dept. of Agriculture were all in on fire suppression for a long, long time.
Yeah–we need to do prescribed burns and forest thinking (rakes!). But this isn’t just a case of stupid public tricks.
Also: climate change is a huge shift. It transforms bad or ill-informed policy of years and decades ago into disasters.
If it weren’t for the media/information war we are currently struggling with, I suspect a case could be persuasively made that we need to pay now for the mitigation required because mega fires are way more expensive than prevention/harm reduction. But we need to blow up the right-wing fuckery system to get that idea across.
Elizabelle
@Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937: I think it is fair to give Cuomo credit for the things he did right.
Aziz, light!
@Tom Levenson: Yes, because that’s where the money was. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
Tracy
@dlwchico: Awwww …. I feel you. I lived in Chico most my life and knew (was gonna say “know”) Paradise well. There’s that feeling fire creates of unseeable loss of something that was yours in the past. There should be a word for that. I imagine that feeling when I think of my former cabin near Lassen burning. I’m sure it will eventually and that makes me so sad. I think of the people and dogs and wine and chocolate that passed thru that cabin. Generations.
You post reminds me of trying to find meaning in loss.
E.
@Martin: That’s my point. Fund prescribed burning, and find a way to get the public to accept it. The current approach isn’t working because of, not to put too fine a point on it, physics.
trollhattan
@Tom Levenson:
Got my Boy Scouts Forestry merit badge in the ’60s and it was Bible (and Weyerhaeuser) that the only and best way to manage a forest was to clearcut it then plant the moonscape with a single species (doug fir from the lab, thank you) so that you skipped the whole first growth nonsense and went straight to a lovely, harvestable carpet of fresh doug firs eager for the mill. Rinse & repeat.
I could spend an hour or five on Reagan, James Watt and the reign of terror they brought upon the Pacific Northwest soon thereafter, but I shan’t. The value of virgin forest is now understood. Too late, but hey.
encephalopath
There is a fair bit of East Coast bias involved here that discounts fire as natural disaster, both media bias and governmental bias. Lots of people in Talent, OR were denied Federal relief money for the fire that destroyed the town last year for… reasons.
Floods, hurricanes, tornadoes… those they understand. But they can’t or don’t want to comprehend what fire means in the West and how overwhelmingly, hugely destructive it can be. Many times there are no efforts on the part of property owners in the form of preventative measures that can stop it.
E.
@Tom Levenson: We’ll, when you are boxed in by a National Park then yes, it limits your options with respect to clearing fuels. In that case if you want a cabin in the forest during climate change then you are living with fire. I am not sure what you expect to happen.
HumboldtBlue
I see the Chico/Paradise folks have covered the bases in that part of the state.
Here’s some more visualization of the fires burning in Northern California.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
This sucks. Your family’s history, the history you hoped to pas on, gone. At least the most tangible, beautiful element of it. Such a beautiful area.
My nephew’s little farm and single-wide trailer were burned out in last year’s fire in the area. He’s been living in a tent on a friend’s farm since spring. Now I need to call my sister and make sure he hasn’t lost even this tenuous home. Jesus wept.
lashonharangue
@E.: what Aziz, light! said
use prescribed burns and forest thinning projects to reduce the fuel load. We can’t do either because the funding isn’t there for it, and because people have built their getaway homes up against every public forest boundary in the West, so that managers have no choice but to put the fires out to protect lives and property.
We have reached the point of drought and fuel loads that even with lots of money prescribed burns will not be practical/safe enough on a large enough scale to be sufficient. Much thinning will be required which will produce material that has little/no commercial value. What is needed is like a 1930’s era CCC labor-intensive effort for at least a generation.
Timurid
The wildfire smoke has reached us all the way in Louisiana. Fortunately most of it is at higher altitudes, and the air quality at ground level is not too bad. But the light is eerie, like it’s near sunset all day long. Sitting here under a strange sky, back in quarantine as we’ve become one of the hottest covid hot spots on Earth feels apocalyptic…
Martin
@Tom Levenson: I’ll post bail, if that helps.
CapnMubbers
I don’t know how to link to the Chico Enterprise-Record article from August 4 where Rep. Doug LaMalfa and two other Republicans did a standup on Oroville Dam behind a podium with a “Manmade Drought” sign. Their contention is that Department of Water Resources impounds too little water, allowing it to flow out to sea instead of benefitting agriculture. Infuriating does not begin to describe how I feel.
I escaped from the Paradise fire nearly three years ago. I lost everything including my community built over forty years of my life. I spent much time in and around Lake Almanor /Mt. Lassen and I believe I can relate to your sense of loss. I’m so sorry.
piratedan
I really hope that with the loss of all of these forests that somebody somewhere is busy planting a shit ton of trees in their place.
Kay
This is good. From the day after the election to January 6th is all one crime and the insurrectionists who attacked the building may end up being the least important part of it. The foot soldiers don’t matter that much.
One of the Many Jens
I’m so sorry, Tom, that sucks. I’m right there with you – several of the places I’ve lived and loved have burned this year.
Re the Dixie Fire, in particular, there also needs to be increased regulation of drone usage – firefighters actually about had it out quite quickly, but air attack had to be grounded because some asshole(s) was/were using drones in AA’s airspace.
Also, I think *everyone*, homeowners and land managers alike, needs to accept at a gut level, that we are no longer in our older, kinder climate. Even treated areas are going up in smoke, because when fuel moisture levels are this low, shit is going to burn. Burn scars only a few years old, reburning (so even prescribed burning will require plenty of follow-up maintenance). San Jose State has the longest-running fuel moisture dataset in California – with April being the time of year with the wettest fuel moistures. The long-term average for fuel moisture at one of their monitoring sites in April: 137%, the record low 115% – until this year, when it was 97%. We’re not only lacking in precip, the increased heat means that the air can hold so much more water – so dry soils sucking down water, dry air sucking up water, there’s a reason why our reservoirs and riparian areas are hurting so badly. The extended drought is stressing our trees, leaving them vulnerable to insect infestation and mortality, and creating yet more fuel. And the expansion of the wildland-urban interface makes both decision-making and fire-fighting more difficult.
Depressing as all hell. But very glad that PGE is moving towards burying their lines – that may help out on more ecological fronts than just fire reduction, some habitats more than others.
debbie
@trollhattan:
This Old House had a several-week series on Paradise and rebuilding. The first week was filled with video clips of the fire and residents’ escapes. It was terrifying.
Tom Levenson
@E.:
A: You must be fun at parties.
B: The literary character you most resemble is Mr. William Collins especially in his moment as Mr. Bennett’s correspondent after the latter’s youngest daughter elopes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_William_Collins)
C: Takes a special kind of asshole to double down on telling someone in the midst of a loss that it’s their fault, especially when they do,so in more or less complete ignorance of all relative details.
Oh, and intercourse yourself sideways with an oxidized farm implement.
Tom Levenson
@One of the Many Jens: Thanks.
Also, yes RE the fundamental changes that climate change and drought are imposing on CA and the American West in general. Which is why I have no patience for commenter E.’s horseshit.
Don K
Way back in 2000, on a road trip around NoCal with a Japanese friend, I visited Lassen Park, and I’m sure we stayed at a lovely country inn in Chester. I’ve been all over the West in my life, and that area struck me as one of the loveliest places I had ever seen. Right now, even absent Covid, I would never plan a vacation to any of the wooded areas of the West.
Martin
Looks like Canyondam is gone. Sounds like Westwood is just a matter of time.
E.
@Tom Levenson: OK Boomer. Lotta people, including one of my 18/hr employees, have lost their actual homes and everything in them in the past few years. In towns and cities. I truly am sorry your 50 plus year old wooden vacation cabin burned down in an arid forest during climate change. But I live here and am saying it is predictable.
Tehanu
So sorry, Tom. I spent some of my childhood near Lassen and it is still my favorite national park, and this just breaks my heart.
TriassicSands
I really feel for most of the people who are losing their homes (and cabins) to wildfires.But not for anyone who votes Republican. My neighbor’s daughter and son-in-law lost their home in Oregon in last year’s fires.
I live in western Washington and one stupid act by one of our many stupid locals could level the entire town. When I came here almost 26 years ago, no one considered wildfires to be much of a threat. Sure, every year some forest service land would get hit and firefighters would risk their health and lives getting the fires under control. On the three major summertime holidays, idiots haul out their obnoxious home fireworks and mindlessly threaten unimaginable destruction, so they can make a bunch of noise and scare their neighbor’s pets. Others conjure up absurd stunts in “gender reveal” celebrations, which strike me as one of the dumbest celebrations imaginable, and one that certainly doesn’t require explosions and fires. Imagine proudly telling your child, “Your gender reveal party was so spectacular that two firefighters died trying to control the conflagration we started!”
If the pandemic has decreased the average life expectancy of Americans, the Internet, which should have been the greatest new source of information and learning in centuries, has surely reduced the average IQ of Americans by scores of points. Is it also responsible for the near eradication of common sense, which seems to have evaporated for millions of Americans?
Tom, here’s hoping for a wildfire miracle.
Sure Lurkalot
Signing on to this dead thread to say this is a post that should be read far and wide.
mvr
I may be wrong but I think that some of the comments here put too much faith in the wisdom, budget constraints and good will of the Forest Service which is after all part of the department of agriculture. In particular I’m not so sure it is the public that won’t allow thinning or controlled burns as opposed to nothing at all or clear-cutting.
I have a small cabin bordering the national forest in WY. It is in an area where there used to be good logging jobs, and a few people still have such. So logging is relatively popular even while tourism is what is bringing in the money. But in fact now much logging is automated – one machine limbs cuts and stacks the tree so the crews are pretty small.
I spent a couple of years thinning in the immediate vicinity of my cabin. Some of that thinning was with a grant from the feds by way of the state during the Obama years. The idea was to create defensible space. I have sided the cabin in cement board and put on a metal roof. It isn’t a McMansion, it is the size of Thoreau’s (10′ x 14′ inside). This past week I spent several days thinning more and taking the slash to the dump because it does not seem safe to burn.
I built where I did, knowing the risks. I would prefer to see it burn than for them to clearcut around me – a real possibility. I’ve done what I can to prevent it from burning and to make sure that anyone fighting a fire at my site will be safe if they choose to do that. But no one owes that to me.
This past couple of years under the prior administration the Forest Service did one Environmental Impact Statement for a rather vague, open ended 15 year plan that allows lots of clear-cutting over the course of that period. The only alternative to their plan that they assessed was do nothing. (The NEPA which mandates EISs requires that the department choose the alternative method of accomplishing legitimate goals that is least harmful to the environment – fewer alternatives thus makes it easier to get a project OKed.) I was one of many objectors during the comment period and at various hearings. I only learned about the project by accident a few days before the comments closed, but that gave me status to object further at hearings until they went ahead and OKed it before Trump left office.
I started with an I might be wrong and I meant it. But the vagueness and scope of the proposal as well as the lack of clear benchmarks covering an entire forest of 2.9 million acres makes me suspicious, as does the fact that the plan lasts 15 years but would by its wording seem to allow them to do all the cutting they intend immediately. Similarly the fact that they call everything from a controlled burn, to thinning to clear-cutting a “treatment” and that their plan generally allows any treatment throughout much of the forest makes me think it is designed to avoid real scrutiny.Furthermore, their report admitted that they would pay more to build the roads and infrastructure for the logging firms than they would be paid for the timber they sell. The report suggests that the benefits to hikers who might be hit by a falling dead tree (there are in fact many beetle-killed trees) makes up for the fact that the logging is not profitable.
If budget shortfalls are what is causing an absence of controlled burns and thinning perhaps they should charge more for the logs or perhaps just do some strategic controlled burns? The plan looks more like it is designed to favor logging interests than anything to do with fire safety given that the beetle-killed trees have largely lost their needles which may experts think make them about as worrisome as standing live trees where fire is concerned.
Again, I might be overly suspicious. I’m probably going to find out within a couple of years. I don’t in fact have anything against fire safety and I think they do need to do some logging, including perhaps some strategic clear cutting to make breaks where they can fight fires. But what they seem to be doing goes beyond that and their plan seems not to put much limit on how far beyond that they will go.
I hope I’m wrong.In some sense I’m sure these folks mean well. They reflect the pro-logging culture of where they live where this is what they are used to. But what they are doing is in fact an end run around the National Environmental Policy Act.
(I wish I could see the WSIWYG version since this is formatting funny each time I edit and my codes get replaced in what seem to my limited HTML-experienced mind to be inconsistent ways.)
Kevin, West Coast Avenger
@trollhattan: PG&E should have been shut down after the Camp fire.
Ksmiami
@Tom Levenson: I grew up in the South Bay and my family is a known California ag group but my grandfather always worried about smart land use, water efficiency and environmental (non pesticide use) to the point he split from the Delano ppl and started a large operation in Imperial Valley. The beauty and the fragility of California against AGW and human destruction is tragic and I’m very sorry for your loss. There are going to be so many individual tragedies that turn into a patchwork quilt that I hope can steel us all to change and preserve what we can.
Tom Levenson
@E.: Let be perfectly clear.
Fuck off.
Fuck all the way off.
Fuck that far off.
It takes a special kind of asshole to preen over another’s loss. It takes an extra-special one to say that someone’s loss doesn’t measure up to someone elses. You might really want to take a long look at yourself, because maliciously aggressive unkindness is no way to go through life.
Jim Appleton
Very late to the thread, apologies.
I’m a former fire chief in the northwest corner of Wasco county Oregon.
Also a childhood neighbor of Tom and someone marginally familiar with the territory he talks about here.
Fire has devastated the west beyond comprehension.
If I had half Adam Silvermans qualifications to ring the bell of through the looking glass about how dire things are from the low sub-Arctic to Mexico on the west coast, I’d probably get excused from BJ as well.
WeimarGerman
Tom, I didn’t want your last message to be the last one here. So I’ll repeat what 99.44% of everyone here said, sorry for your loss. I moved to southern CA 25 years ago, and for 20 years have spent at least a week every summer in Sequoia National Forest. We even managed to go last year in August, but this year we wont make it. Most years I ascend Buck Rock lookout and notice how the beetles have decimated those forests, how the brown trees are waiting for lightning, or a stupid idiot who thinks their fire won’t get out of control.
I read your piece, feeling some of your loss, in expectation that soon there will be a similar conflagration to hit Sequoia & Kings Canyon. I’m in tears for the grandchildren I don’t yet have…
OzarkHillbilly
You have my most sincere sympathies, Tom.
Flea, RN
@namekarB: Alta. The house is on the lake, built before the highway. My family used to take the train to Alta, then rent horses to take them to the house.
Irene
Tom’s sister here, strong-arming my way into his post and this thread to echo his sentiments. The loss — both personal and collective — of these pristine and truly magical forest and alpine places is almost unbearable, particularly since some (all?) of this devastation can be laid right at the feet of the Republican cabal. My brothers and I grew up in those burning mountains. We became closer and closer after we lost our parents; then we started raising our own children there. Those children would have done the same. Now we’re just waiting to see what’s left after the fire tornado wears itself out.
CorgiMum
Your cabin must be right near my son-in-law’s – he and my daughter got married in that meadow, 5 years ago today. Not their happiest anniversary today.
J R in WV
Beautiful countryside, thanks for the photos. Sorry for your probable loss! Would help with a rebuild, but am 3000 miles away and elderly/decrepit… would just be in the way!
Take care!
Miss Bianca
Sorry to hear about your loss, Tom. Something all too many people in the West get to experience firsthand, unfortunately. I remember when the Decker Fire took out the beautiful Boy Scout camp where the first Rocky Mountain Fiddle Festival took place, and how devastated I felt by that, even though I had only the most tangential attachment to the place – it wasn’t like I’d spent every summer there.
Here at the Mountain Hacienda we are experiencing a rare very rainy summer, which has suppressed fire danger in CO’s central mountains but caused vegetation to explode around the house. It’s wet enough that I’m not worried right now, but do foresee a busy fall and winter pulling up plant skeletons. Meanwhile, my particular friend D is still engaged in his seasonal activity of logging dead trees around the place. He’s cut down around a dozen this year so far, but still a lot to go.
Heywood J.
I live about 20 miles from Chico, and have lived in the area since 1974. Last time I saw skies this smoky and gray was the weekend of the Camp Fire. Ash is falling on cars — again, this is at least 50 miles from the nearest actual fire, probably more.
It is only going to get worse. This summer is worse than last summer, which was worse than the previous one, and so on. I’m 54 now; I don’t want to think about what the summer of 2031 or 2041 will be like around here, when I’m in my sixties or seventies, and no longer able to physically manage the issues of living in a sweltering smokehole.
Oh, and our well went dry two weeks ago, so $13k later, we have a 5k-gal tank hooked up, and maybe in 6 months and another $20k or so, we can get a deeper well punched. Thanks, almond growers!
While I agree 100% with Tom that Republicans at the national level — and dickheads like Doug LaMalfa — have done their level best to ignore and exacerbate this crisis, California has Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, the entire state hierarchy, both US Senators, etc. Most of the local reps north of Sac are Republicons, but at the state level, their numbers are inconsequential.
I’d say there’s a better than decent chance Newsom gets recalled in a few weeks, and if he does, this is why more than anything — the lack of even appearing marginally effective in a decade of wildfire-drought cycles. After the Camp Fire, he basically let PG&E walk away from their responsibilities, instead of telling them that if they wanted to remain in business, they were going to start burying every goddamned line within 50 miles of a fire zone, they would foot the bill themselves, and they’d thank us for the privilege.
That’s just an example. All of this was easy to foresee, even by Newsom himself, and it’s impossible to tell what, if anything, the state has done to prepare financially, operationally, logistically, or in any other respect, for what we’ve been enduring all summer. I literally have to tap into my meager retirement savings in order to get water back into my house, so I can sell the damned thing and GTFO while there’s still time, because there’s no relief money for anyone except the fuckers that caused the problem in the first place.
That, afaic, is a deep failure on the part of Newsom and the Dems that run this state. They should have had things in place, for what they knew was coming. They should have FEMA money and logistics coming in to assist. Instead they dicked around and here we are, half the north state burning, running out of firefighters (and prison slaves), people taking camp showers in their own houses for weeks, city aquifers being run out to supply wasteful assholes. CA Dems can pretty much do whatever they want, since they have the numbers, and they’ve chosen to do jack shit.
Don’t get me wrong — I will show up and vote against the recall, mainly because there isn’t a single Republican in this state (or in the country) that has any better ideas. But you spend a week or so here right now, and it’s not difficult to see why people are pissed off and fed up.
Another Scott
@Heywood J.: I was shocked to see a headline that a poll said “recall” was winning. I didn’t click the link, so I don’t know the details, but even if it was a crappy poll it’s worrying. Momentum is very important in politics and if voters think that other voters are taking recall seriously then it can be self-fulfilling. :-(
Thanks for the reminder that good people can never rest while they’re in elected office. They always have to be looking ahead because every bad thing will be blamed on them – fairly or not. Change is happening rapidly now, so there’s no rest.
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.