Front Burner - California’s fiery future

Episode Date: November 1, 2019

There are multiple wildfires burning in California right now as they did last year, and the year before. Six of the state’s ten most destructive wildfires have taken place in the last two years. And as the state gets hotter, and dryer, the fires are expected to get even more destructive. Today on Front Burner, the west coast bureau chief with the Atlantic’s CityLab, Laura Bliss, on her home state’s increasingly fiery future.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. California is burning. Wildfires in the north of the state and in the south. Hundreds of thousands of people have had to evacuate their homes, just like last year and the year before that. As California gets hotter and drier thanks to climate change,

projections show the fires are likely going to get worse. Today, I'm talking to Laura Bliss, the West Coast Bureau Chief for the Atlantic City Lab, about what the future holds for a fiery California. I'm Jamie Poisson. This is FromBurner. Hi, Laura. Hi, Jamie. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I was hoping to start that you could give us a sense of the fires in California right now.

What are they like? The last week has been really quite dystopic, I think is the word that a lot of people have used. Yes, the images are unbelievable. Yeah, right. used. Yes, the images are unbelievable. Yeah, right. We've seen hundreds of thousands of people evacuating their homes out of the path of fire, both north of the San Francisco Bay Area and in greater Los Angeles, you know, two of the most densely populated parts of the country. If you're in the mandatory evacuation zone and you're still there watching this, you're an idiot. Get the hell out. It's way too dangerous. People that stay behind are just endangering themselves.

Tens of thousands of acres of wild land and developed land burned. And then, of course, earlier this week, about a million customers from the largest utility in California losing their power. So I think the combination of all those things has really been, yeah, a rude reawakening to what many call the new normal for California in the autumn. Right. And you mentioned customers that have lost their power. Can you tell me a little bit more about these blackouts? risk of wildfire occurring as a result of their equipment sparking, they were going to shut down power for just an unprecedented number of their customers. Given the forecast, we're looking at potentially turning off power to approximately 200,000 customers in parts of 16 counties.

Counties are largely located in the Sierra Foothills and the North Bay. And this really resonated because just this past year in 2018, Pacific Gas and Electric was found responsible for the ignition of the fire that destroyed Paradise. This was a town that was just completely incinerated by this wildfire that investigations later found PG&E's sparking equipment caused. Cal Fire has determined that the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive fire in state history, was indeed started by PG&E power lines. And with these blackouts, you know, I know we're not just talking about not being able to charge your phone, although, of course, in an emergency like being part of a wildfire evacuation, being able to charge your phone is pretty important.

But what other effects are these blackouts having? So not only are you not able to charge your phone, in some cases, you're not able to use your phone because cell towers are out, excuse me, they were out in much of the area that was affected. I should add that part of the approach with shutting down the power and trying to avert wildfire from sparking, and this is really important, right, is that there are these really super powerful gusting winds in northern and southern California right now. And for PG&E, that's the Santa Ana winds. And over the weekend, I mean, these were gusts of up to 70, 80 miles per hour. So there was a real concern, right, about these winds causing sparks to fly off of their equipment and into trees and catching onto houses and that kind

of thing. So anyhow, back to the effects, you're, you know, entering areas without any electrical service. That can also mean there is no cell service period. And that affects your ability to make critical communications. It affects the ability of local police departments to, you know, be active and responsive. It affects the delivery of water in some cases. Obviously, refrigeration is impacted. And then there are people who are, of course, quite medically vulnerable, you know, who need to charge important medical equipment or access medication, research labs, it's really just almost every part of society is affected at some point. Right. And of course, you mentioned these wildfires aren't new in California, right? We've been hearing headlines about wildfires in California for many years now.

But is it fair for me to say that it feels like they're getting worse? You know, how are these fires changing on the ground? Yeah, it's important to realize that wildfire, there's a reason it's called wild. It is part of California's natural ecology. It's part of the natural ecology of a lot of North America, in fact, right, to have fires that burn through forests. What we've seen more and more is a couple of factors. One, California is famous for its sprawl, right? It's post-war kind of suburban model where you've got more people living in, you know, fairly undensely packed neighborhoods with big yards and people are moving, you know, further and further away from cities and into the kind of wildland urban interface near these forests that are increasingly becoming like tinderboxes as droughts become more prevalent and the air gets drier and hotter, right? This is where the climate change component comes in. Plus you've got these really powerful natural winds, the Santa Anas and the Diablo winds as well. And so you've got kind of

an exacerbated version of something that has always been part of California's natural ecology. And I think just to read a statistic, there was just a study that recently found that California's wildfires burn five times as much land per year as they did in 1972. Wow. In effect, that is directly attributable to climate change. But remember, some of that is forest land, and more and more of it is developed land where people live. And that's really kind of a human-caused side of the story that we haven't really stopped building in areas that are the most prone to catching fire.

Right, and now we're seeing all of these evacuations. Since it's getting more intense every year, I imagine it's also affecting the air quality. We're seeing increased people with respiratory difficulties and also cardiac issues. I mean, that's very common. Wildfire smoke, most people don't realize it's a nasty, complex mixture. It's got a lot of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, particulates.

And it's those fine particles, what we call the fine particulate matter, that's really a problem. You talked about these blackouts. How are Californians coping with this new reality? That's right. In San Francisco this past week, I've definitely seen people wearing N97 masks, right? These kinds of like souped up surgical masks that filter out some of the bad air particles and try to help people breathe a bit better. I mean, talk about dystopian, right? It's when you're going around a city and seeing people wear this and we're not even. I've seen a bunch of images like this on the news.

Yeah. And of course, that is the least of the concerns, the sort of social concerns. Of course, there are people who are losing their homes this week, like hundreds of structures, more than 100 structures have been burned between these different fires. It's probably well over that at this point. And so these are people losing their homes. And for some, it's going to be somewhat easier to pick up and rebuild, because they've got good, good insurance, and they have some of their own assets. And for some, it's going to be somewhat easier to pick up and rebuild because they've got good insurance and they have some of their own assets. And for other people, it will not be possible to do that. That's been the story from the last couple of devastating fire seasons that, like so much else in society, it really falls along class lines.

Who's able to kind of recover and who has a harder time. Absolutely. This is something we've talked about on this podcast before when it comes to the aftermath of hurricanes, too, that the hurricanes themselves don't discriminate, but they end up hurting people in lower economic brackets far, far more. far, far more. There was a great story in the LA Times earlier this week. Brittany Mejia, who was reporting in some of the areas affected by the Getty Fire in Los Angeles on Monday and Tuesday. And that's a very wealthy part of Los Angeles. It's kind of West LA in a very hilly setting. And there was a, you know, mandatory evacuation order for many of these neighborhoods, which most people who lived there did comply with. But it sounded like a lot of

folks forgot to tell the people who worked for them, as in babysitters and, you know, gardeners and construction workers. And so when Brittany was going arounditters and, you know, gardeners and construction workers. And so when Brittany was going around the neighborhood, you know, looking for stories to report, she found that people were getting out of cars and trying to do their jobs, right? And really insistently trying to do their jobs. So that really revealed a serious gap in communication. I mean, a lot of these folks that she met did not speak English necessarily. And so they hadn't necessarily heard the word about evacuation and hadn't gotten it from their bosses. I just saw another tweet yesterday. There was a magazine that did a story about, you know, a couple that had flown in from somewhere else in the United States to have their

dream wine country wedding and obviously fire broke out, but they still persevered. And there was this very kind of dramatic shot of this bridal couple holding hands with the N97 masks. Right. I saw this. These grape leaves. Yeah. And then there was a really great response by another journalist who pointed out like

there are still farm workers out there. There are still people going to work in these conditions because they don't have a choice and they haven't necessarily had the right level of communication or resources to help them not go to work. Right, right. We talked about Paradise. How did that town rebuild after the fire last year? So it's really depended, right? I've spoken with people who lost their homes in Paradise and have bounced around three times between relatives and friends, you know, all up and down the state and into Oregon.

And, you know, now they're back in kind of the northern counties up above the Bay Area and trying to find a place to live permanently. So it's really an ongoing crisis. We're very happy to be able to come to our property and not see everything that we lost. We're very happy to be able to come to our property and not see everything that we lost. Elena Murray and her husband, Scott, as of today, they're the first people on Fern Lane in Paradise to see their lot cleared. It happened only today. Other people have tried to resettle in some of the neighboring communities in Butte County up there, and it's been a challenge for some of those communities to accommodate the influx of thousands of people in some cases.

There's been, you know, kind of struggles over whether to build affordable housing for them or specially built shelters. And it actually, it plays into this other piece of the story, which raises questions about how is California responding to its broader housing crisis? There is a gap of almost 3 million housing units for the number of people who want to live here over the next few years, and that's been a huge political issue. And I think the fires showing, kind of revealing the flaws in some of California's building patterns are playing into that. It's incredible to think of the domino effects that these fires are having, how they affect things that you probably would never have thought about.

Absolutely. It seems to connect to so many different aspects in society and so many problems. And, you know, I was just speaking with Steve Pine earlier this morning, who is a renowned historian of fire, like the cultural aspects of fire. Basically, Steve's point is that fire is part of the natural ecology. It's here to stay. We're doing things that are exacerbating its disastrous and tragic effects. But there's also good fire, right? The kind that has existed for as long as life has been on this planet. And there's things that California can look to in other states. For example, Florida has had a long practice of prescribed burning, right? Where its fire service actually

expends resources in doing controlled burns to create environmental settings that are going to be less flammable, you know, when disaster strikes the next time. Yeah, we have that here in Canada too. Most people think there's just one type of firefighter, your traditional structure firefighters that will go to your house every day if you have a fire or a medical call. But that's not the case throughout Florida, especially South Florida.

I'm a wildland firefighter. We get called all over for any wildland fire. We not only just fight fires, but we do prescribe fires also to help clean out the land. Right. So he's trying to sort of reshape the narrative a little bit around, you know, there's bad fire and then there's good fire and that California may need to start looking a little bit more broadly at this picture. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization,

empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. You know, all of this begs the question for me, you know, as these bad fires continue, these fires that are threatening people's homes and, you know, even killing people. And as they continue year after year, as they're projected to, what does this mean for California? It's a great question. I think it's important to recognize that California has struggled with a lot of different types of disaster. I mean, it's like a meme about this state, right? We have earthquakes and landslides and fires,

and it's just like about to drop off the edge of the country. There's like a famous 1993 book by Mike Davis that describes California as like an apocalyptic theme park. And there's just like always been this sense that it can't sustain. But that hasn't proven to be the case so far. California is pretty resilient. Clearly, the last three years have presented a persistent and unprecedented level of disaster in the form of wildfire. And I think that, you know, given the state's ongoing momentum on its own climate change policy, I mean, this is the state that is doing the most in our country right now to

be progressive on these issues. I do think that it seems likely with so many years and so much destruction that the state is, could be at a turning point on some of these issues to take a look, you know, at new approaches to how it treats fire, its building codes, to hardening homes, to rethinking, you know, how our electricity is distributed. I think there is quite a lot of momentum here. And clearly, what we've been doing for the last decades, many, many decades, hasn't been working. I wonder if you give me some examples of what they might consider. Sure. So I mean, one idea that comes up again and again, that just seems so obvious is burying power lines. It's going to be incredibly expensive to do that and take a really really long time I think the

cost is like two to three million dollars a mile and California is a very big state but that may very well be a very logical thing to do in a number of communities another thing is there are more resilient and hardened building approaches that we can take so that we don't have you know wood shingle roofs and wood siding and buried into the most flammable parts of our forest. We can also have building codes that actually restrict, you know, further housing from being built in some of those very, very prone areas. There's also the fire insurance industry, which has been dropping Californians off of their policies because people keep rebuilding in the same spots and then, you know, they keep getting insured and that's becoming incredibly expensive to continue

to rebuild. And that's a big issue. But that may be kind of another mechanism by which change occurs. There's also talk about, you know, stronger regulations for Pacific Gas and Electric, this utility that has been found to be the cause of so many of these destructive fires. So I think we're going to see a lot of conversation around that going forward since it seems likely that they may also have played a role in some of the most destructive fires we've seen in the last week. A new bill would force PG&E and other state electric utility companies to move their transmission lines and equipment out of fire zones or underground. Assemblyman Jim Frazier introduced the bill as a way to minimize the risk of future wildfires.

PG&E is being investigated for its role in the Camp Fire. These all sound like great ideas to me, but I wonder if you think they'll be enough. As you mentioned, this is a state that has some of the most progressive climate action policies in the United States. I want to read you a quote from the mayor of Los Angeles, which has stuck with me. There's no number of helicopters or trucks that we can buy, no number of firefighters that we can have, no amount of brush that we can clear that will stop this. The only thing that will stop this is when the earth, probably long after we're gone, relaxes into a more predictable weather state. When you hear that, and I don't mean to sound callous, but at what point do some of these policies or ideas seem futile to you? question that could be asked of so many places in the world right now that are really on the front lines of climate change. I mean, I think one part of the story and part of the future of California will be not necessarily embracing, but understanding that there's a new normal and

that these kinds of fires are going to keep happening well into the future. There may be even worse fires. I don't know. I'm not sure, you know, maybe some people will leave California. Some people certainly already have as a result of losing their homes, just as they have in other parts of the world, you know, whether it's because of sea level rise or terrible hurricanes or destructive fires too. You know, they'll leave. Other people, I think, will persist and try to help guide California into a more sustainable and adaptable future. But I think that startling quote of realism from the mayor is true. It's true. Do you mind if I ask, do you find yourself wondering what your own future there might hold? It's a question I think a lot of people who are directly affected by disaster get asked, you know, like in Florida, other parts of the Atlantic South that get affected by huge hurricanes every year, you know, why do you keep returning? Why do you keep going back?

But I think like for so many people, this is my home. You know, it's not just about the place itself. It's the people and it's the culture and it's the surrounding environment, which is rapidly changing. But it's going to take a lot to get me to leave. I think the other question then becomes like, OK, we're not leaving. You know, what are we going to do with this place going forward? OK. Laura Bliss, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Okay, so a couple of times this year we've run episodes about Sidewalk Labs.

It's supposed to be a futuristic neighborhood built in Toronto by a Google affiliate. There's been lots of controversy around it, about land value, about corporate influence, and about all the data that could be gathered from the people who work and live in the district. Well, after reducing the amount of land they wanted to develop and a few other concessions, government agencies and the Google sister company Alphabet have taken another step forward. Before it gets built, it still needs to go through a more formal evaluation and more public consultation and then a final vote in March of 2020. You can find our Sidewalk Lab episodes in our feed and we'll keep you posted on any developments in the months ahead. That's all for today, though.

FrontBurner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced by Shannon Higgins, Imogen Burchard, Chris Berube, Elaine Chao, and Laura Carlin. This was Chris's last week on the show. We'll miss you, Chris. Thank you so much for everything, and good luck in your next endeavor. Derek Vanderwyk is our sound designer, with help this week from the wonderful Billy Heaton.

Our music is by Joseph Shabison of Boombox Sound. The executive producer of Frontburner is Nick McCabe-Locos. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening and have a wonderful weekend. See you on Monday. See you on Monday. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.