Read on Twitter
This has been a truly unprecedented week out West, and hard personally to watch communities I know get hit so hard. In California alone an area almost the size of Connecticut has burned already this year, much of that in the past two weeks. https://twitter.com/capitalweather/status/1304107017590669313?s=20
2/ This fire season has been called “once in a generation” - a perfect storm. More likely it’s a window into the future. They're a product of every challenge we face w/ wildfire: ppl moving to fire-prone areas, a legacy of fire suppression/logging, & a rapidly changing climate
3/ These fires are burning hotter and moving faster, and destroying life and property across entire regions. We need to do something, or we’re on track for this level of devastation to be the new normal. A few examples:
1. Weather conditions grew small ignitions so quickly it took almost a day to confirm that one had burned 250K acres in <2 days -- suddenly a top 10 fire in CA history (!) Completely unprecedented and terrifying https://twitter.com/Weather_West/status/1303697203295256576?s=20
2. In Washington state, more acres have burned this week than in some FIRE SEASONS https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/an-unprecedented-event-more-than-300000-acres-washington-have-burned-since-monday/JXRCP7TFTFE5RER7C3MYWCV5PM/
3. In Oregon, fires in wetter forests that usually don’t burn have forced 500K ppl from their homes--10% of the state’s entire population. Unheard of. https://apnews.com/8e4e0818146a72c713de625e902f9962?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=AP&utm_campaign=SocialFlow
4. In SW Oregon, a small grass fire grew at speeds we haven’t really seen in the state, burning through two towns in just a few hours #AlmedaFire https://mailtribune.com/news/top-stories/fema-estimates-600-homes-burned-from-almeda-fire
5. Trees in the Sierra Nevada, killed by droughts linked to climate change, fueled a fire that spread so fast it required air rescues for hundreds. So many fires started elsewhere you could almost forget it’s still burning #CreekFire https://abc7.com/creek-fire-175893-acres-now-burned-with-025-containment/6416891/
6. So many fires, and so many big fires too. 6 of CA’s 20 biggest fires started this year https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/6-of-top-20-largest-fires-in-california-history-happened-this-year
4/ Fire crews have been stretched to capacity responding to these fires (and literally hundreds of others) https://twitter.com/JimWhittington/status/1303754715205787648?s=20
5/ When the winds calm down and the fires slow, we’ll still have months of fire season left & years of this ahead. Some years will be worse. The question for most of us is, how do we prepare?
6/ First, we absolutely have to take climate action. @amprog has laid out a framework to get to net zero emissions by 2050, @ClimateCrisis and others have plans as well. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2019/10/10/475605/100-percent-clean-future/
7/ 2nd, we can’t just keep fighting fires when they happen. We consistently underinvest in preparedness even tho we know better, and there's 12M Americans in fire prone areas who lack resources to prepare for/recover from wildfire. Read more here: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2019/07/25/472639/before-the-fire/
8/ This means smart building codes and investments in retrofits (home-to-home ignition is a problem), but also managing defensible space and, well, not building out into high risk places. We’ve moved TO the fire more than it's come to us. This all costs $$, but saves lives.
9/ We also need to think about what we want from our forests. They’re our natural carbon sink, but decades of logging/fire suppression have changed how many look (and burn). We know what/how to change - traditional ecological knowledge and forest ecology are there to guide us.
10/ But again, this all costs $$ and requires new goals for our forest stewards, public & private. It can’t be paid for by turning back the clock to more clear-cutting. We may not see the benefits right away, but how many more burned out communities are we willing to accept?
