Today, Explained - Still burning

Episode Date: November 19, 2018

The Camp Fire is the most destructive fire in California history, surpassing a record set just a few months ago. Vox’s Umair Irfan heads to Paradise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Umair Irfan, you've been out there in Northern California reporting on the fires for Vox. What exactly happened up there in Paradise, California? As best as we can tell, the fire ignited around 6.30 a.m. near Camp Fire Road on Thursday, November 8. This is in a region of California that's kind of rural. It's far from some of the bigger cities. It's in the hills. It's a very forested area. The area is actually right next to a couple national forests, and it's not very densely populated, but there are definitely a lot of trees, and many of them were ripe to burn. They were essentially giant matchsticks. California, as you may know, has been facing years of drought, upward of six years,

and also bark beetle infestations that have been spreading since 2010. And that's led to a record number of dead trees throughout the state, 129 million. The wind had been picking up. There are seasonal winds here in this area that can gust up to 70 miles an hour. So at one point, this fire was spreading at a rate of about a football field per second. And right in the path of those flames was a town called Paradise, California. This is a small community of about 26,000 people. It's not very wealthy, but most people there own their own homes. A lot of trailer and mobile homes as well. And once the flames started approaching, I mean, it very rapidly engulfed the town.

Trees were running right between houses. And so residents reported hearing tree trunks exploding, propane tanks going off, sounding like bombs. More than one person told me it sounded like a war zone. One woman I spoke to, Lana Jimenez, she told me that it was so surprising. The fire was burning in a way she had never seen before. It wasn't burning from the ground up, but rather it was blowing through the air. She described it as a can of spray paint just spraying fire onto trees.

The fire was flowing basically horizontally through the air, and it was something that she had never seen before. I talked to a resident named Brooke Jenkins, who kind of made it pretty clear just how fast this fire spread. I mean, she recalled waking up and seeing the sky turning orange. We see trees and ambers falling all around out of the sky. But she took her kids to school, and by the time she got back home, she realized the situation was a lot worse, and so she scrambled back to school to pick up her children.

I show up at Ponderosa Elementary School, and it's like a war zone. People can't find their kids. Teachers are frantically loading kids onto buses. They told me my kids would be out front. My kids weren't out front. Luckily, I found them. By the time that we got home, the fire was all around our house.

We didn't have time to get anything. My husband grabbed my baby in his diaper, threw all of our animals, our cats, dogs, everything, and all three cars that we possibly could. Since this is a small town, there aren't a whole lot of roads going in and out. And so that was already one big problem. And as they were getting out of town, you know, everybody was in this 26,000 person town and also the small towns around it were on these narrow highways heading toward Chico away from the fire. And very very quickly the highways became congested. First of all, there's a ton of smoke. It hurts visibility.

There's fire racing along the side of the highway as well, but just the traffic built up such that people were waiting hours and hours just to cover that narrow 15-mile distance. People ran out of gas. People had to get out and run on foot. Brooke Jenkins told me that she had to get out of her car and try to retrieve her children who were in a separate car further back. This tree is starting to fall around us.

My kids were separated in a different car. I had EMT blocking me and telling me I couldn't get to my kids. So I started walking down the road and left my husband and our dogs inside. ...the hospital, from the Condor Road Elementary School. Evacuation orders entered for the Carnegie Zone, North Pine Zone. They say if you need assistance in evacuating,

to call 911. It was a very harrowing escape, and a lot of people barely made it out. And unfortunately, it turns out many people did not. Close to 80 people have died, and it's kind of alarming how they died. Several of them did die in their own vehicles trying to flee the fire, which just kind of shows how quickly it moved and how even people who were in cars couldn't get out of harm's way fast enough.

At this point, the campfire is still burning. It has torched more than 150,000 acres, more than 10,000 homes. It's forced more than 52,000 people to evacuate,000 acres, more than 10,000 homes. It's forced more than 52,000 people to evacuate, and it's left about a thousand missing. Officials say that these are people that family members and friends have reported missing, and they're just not accounted for. So we really don't know what their current status is. Workers are still searching house by house to look for human remains. That number might still go up, it might go down. We don't know yet. We're still in the early stages of getting through this fire and grappling with what it's done. So these 50,000 evacuees, Umair, where are they gonna go? That's the big question.

Right now, it's kind of ad hoc. Some have taken shelter in nearby Chico. Some have gone south to Yuba City. Some have gone north to Red Bluff. A lot of the small towns in the area are housing many of the evacuees. But remember, these are small towns. They don't really have a lot of room to take in a whole bunch of people. And this is an area that's already been afflicted by California's housing crisis as well. There's very limited new homes going up. So in some cases, we've had residents just camping out in tents outside of parking lots. I mean, it's important to remember why people moved to Paradise in the first place. I mean, this was an affordable town that was close to nature.

It was a place where people could actually own their own homes, where middle class and working class people could actually afford to live. And it was lovely. A lot of residents love being close to nature. For a lot of folks, even after this fire, even knowing what could possibly happen, their main goal is to go back and rebuild paradise. I'm going to go. were the people who worked for him. And over the years, despite doing thousands of interviews, Conan never really made any lasting friendships with any of his celebrity guests. So he has now started a podcast to do just that. If you've ever wanted to hear Coco go deeper,

go more playful, and go free from FCC regulations, this is the show for you. Conan O'Brien hangs out with the people whose company he's enjoyed most over the years in an attempt to find some real, lasting friendship. The first guest on the show, someone you may have heard of, his name appears to be Will Farrell. Conan O'Brien needs a friend, wherever you find your podcasts. umair you were in paradise you've been in northern california covering these fires for the past week what's it like there i mean what does it smell like you've seen smoke ash what what's what's in the air well if you've been to the bay, you know it's notorious for its fog.

But this is a kind of haze that persists throughout the day. And it's dense, and it actually kind of hurts to breathe in. In San Francisco, the air quality has reached unhealthy levels. You see people walking around wearing masks. And then as you go further north, closer to where the fire is, the air just gets denser thicker and more dangerous um in chico uh it looks like it's sunset throughout the whole day i mean the smoke there just kind of obscures the sunlight and basks the town in this kind of golden twilight the air there smells dusty and dry actually kind of sweet as well because you know we're burning trees here and trees actually don't smell all that bad when they burn but those particles are still extremely dangerous you see children playing outside wearing

masks if you stand still long enough i mean you'll you might notice that you're getting covered in a little bit of dust um and then if you get closer and closer to where the fire actually burned inside paradise where i went there's still ash falling from trees. There's a thin layer of dust on the road. Everything has sort of this gray haze to it. And it's just very ethereal. And it's also extremely quiet. There aren't even leaves rustling. Most of those have burned away. So it's just brick chimneys standing among forests, these burned out dead trees. And all around you have workers in white Tyvek suits probing the remains with cadaver dogs, just hoping maybe that they can identify if anybody else was left behind.

You mentioned kids playing outside. Is it dangerous to be outside in California? I mean, how bad is the air quality? have to. For people who have breathing difficulties, problems like emphysema or even asthma, that can lend you in the emergency room. It can also exacerbate issues like high blood pressure. It can aggravate things like heart attacks. So yeah, it's definitely a risk and people are being constantly exposed to it. I mean, a lot of the stores right now in that area are sold out of these N95 masks, the masks that are, you know, rated to protect against the kinds of particles that are in the air right now. So there's a looming health concern. I mean, if you walk around where so many of the evacuees are staying, I mean, you'll hear coughing all throughout. And while you've got this fire burning in Northern California and making a mess of air quality, there's also a fire burning in Southern California, right? Yeah, that's right. There's the Woolsey Fire close to Los Angeles that's burning through

shrubland and grassland. And yeah, that's causing a lot of damage there as well, but not quite on the same scale as the campfire in the north. Trump visited Northern California over the weekend. He was walking around with Governor Jerry Brown and Governor-elect Gavin Newsom. I mean, as big as they look on the tube, you don't see what's going on until you come here. And what we saw at Pleasure, what a name right now. But what we just saw, we just left Pleasure for Paradise. And what we just saw at Paradise is just, you know, it's just not acceptable. He, of course, tweeted,

There's no reason for these massive, deadly, and costly forest fires in California, except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forest's remedy now, or no more federal payments. Is he actually holding money from California during this statewide emergency? No, he hasn't actually made good on that threat. He has approved emergency disaster aid for California. But his point there just about, you know, blaming forest fires, saying that there's no reason for this other than mismanagement it's important to remember that forest fires are natural

they are part of the ecosystem even without humans being there it's something that would happen pretty frequently and regularly it's an important way to clear out dying brush it's an important way to help certain plants germinate it helps restore nutrients to the soil there are some issues with how that land is being managed, though. As people have moved closer and closer to forests, the strategy has been to suppress fires rather than to allow them to burn naturally.

This is to protect property and to protect people's lives. But a consequence of that is that trees build up, the forest becomes more dense, and a lot of decaying brush starts building up. And then when you have years of drought, all that dries out and that leaves a huge volume of fuel that's just ripe to burn, leading to larger and more destructive fires. So the paradox here, or sort of the irony here, is that our habit of trying to put out fires aggressively has helped fuel some of the larger, more dangerous blazes. But who's actually at fault here? Who manages these forests? Is it the state? Is it municipalities? Who's doing a good or bad job of taking care of this? That is a big problem. I mean, there are three main interested parties here. There are the private

landowners, people who own property and homes and businesses. There's the state of California, which manages some of the forests. And then there's the federal government, which manages some of the forests. All three can control or have jurisdiction over some parts of the forest, and all three of them have competing interests, and they have different strategies for managing these forests. And that kind of leads to some of the conflicts that we're kind of dealing with right now. Big issue though, is that as far as we know, most of the fires are actually burning on federal land. So it's not something you can actually blame on California's land management practices. So Donald Trump is talking shit about

California's management of its forests when the majority of this land is actually controlled by the federal government? That's right. It's controlled by the U.S. Forestry Service or it's being managed under the Department of the Interior. And since they're under federal jurisdiction, California doesn't really, isn't allowed to go in there and start cutting down trees that they think are dangerous. And in recent years, the federal government has been cutting funding for fire suppression programs and also forest management programs. And the Trump administration, though, has called for more logging, and they've pitched that as an alternative or as a solution to this, but it really isn't because loggers want the biggest and healthiest trees that have the most resale values. The big problem that we're facing right now are these dead trees. Those have very

little resale value, but they're the ones that are the biggest threat. And it's really hard to get any private company interested in cutting down these dead useless trees. And there's 129 million of them. So you have to, it's a huge endeavor to try to limit these fire hazards. Is there any chance that the president's trip to California could like foster some better federal state relationship that might help prevent these kinds of fires in the future? I don't think the president is going to be playing too close of a role, but Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was also here last week. This is my fourth time to California, all of which have been fires.

And every time I come back, I say this is the worst fire I've seen. Yesterday is the worst fire I've seen. And Zinke himself has also, you know, said some controversial things about the fires. this is the worst fire I've seen. Yesterday is the worst fire I've seen. And Ziki himself has also, you know, said some controversial things about the fires. He blamed environmental terrorist groups for increasing fire risks. But he seems to have more of a grasp as to what the factors are here. This is not the time for finger pointing. This is the time to make sure that we address putting out the fire. We look at Paradise to make sure we look at who's unaccountable, make sure we give aid where it's necessary, and begin the recovery process.

In some cases, this is going to be long. So with that, I'd like to introduce the great governor for the great state of California. Is the state taking anything away from this? Are people taking anything away from this? Is there anything to be learned from all of this loss? I think so. I think looking at a fire like this where all the worst case scenarios all converged, it kind of shows us what happens if we do nothing. If we continue doing a business as usual approach to how we live among fires, how we live with this risk.

If we continue building in these high-risk areas, if we continue driving up the temperatures around the world, and if we continue, you know, not actively managing the forest and reducing the fuel loads, all that means is in the future we're going to continue to see larger, more destructive, and climate for Vox. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Spencer Hall, you're the host of the It Seems Smart podcast from SB Nation. It's on the Vox Media Podcast Network. How did you kick off the season of It Seems Smart?

We started the season with the season of It Seems Smart? We started the season with the tale of Albert Bell and the Great Bat Caper. This involves a Major League Baseball player filling a bat with cork, which you're not supposed to do, getting it confiscated by the officials, and then one brave teammate deciding to get it back by committing an act of cat burglary through the roof of a major league ballpark. What? What team was this again? This would be the Cleveland Indians in 1994 versus the Chicago White Sox. Spencer, I feel like I'm starting to pick up a theme of the podcast, which is everyone in professional sports is looking for ways to get ahead and cheat. Yeah. And one other theme of the podcast is that typically when people try to do this,

it goes sideways fast. Okay. So people can find that one. That of the podcast is that typically when people try to do this, it goes sideways fast. Okay, so people can find that one. That was the first one that kicked off the season, huh? That's the first one. You can find it iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for It Seems Smart from the Vox Media Podcast Network from SBNation.com.