Today, Explained - When a season lasts a year

Episode Date: August 8, 2018

California’s Mendocino Complex Fire is now the biggest in the state’s recorded history, surpassing a record set… last year. Vox’s Umair Irfan says the worst is yet to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for today's Explain This Week comes from Squarespace. The company wants to help you turn your great ideas into a reality on the internet. Check out squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you want to launch a website or buy a domain, you can use the offer code EXPLAINED to save 10%. About two weeks ago, the fire started this was wednesday evening and i went and sat out on my driveway at like 2 30 in the morning and i was just kind of sitting there because summertime nights are my favorite thing in the whole world because it's like warm and dark. I looked up at the streetlight that was right above me and it looked like it was snowing.

I was like this is really odd and I didn't have my contacts in I had my glasses on so I thought maybe it's just my glasses. So I got my cell phone and turned the flashlight on and turned my phone upside down. You know, it was like pointed up to the sky. And I mean, it was snowing, like, but it was ash. You could actually see my footprints, like on our driveway. And I was like, I actually couldn't figure out what was going on. And then I remembered, I was like, oh yeah, there's that fire. I was like, wow, the, the wind must've picked up or, you know, something. And so I just looked up on my phone, like Redding fire, like Redding area fire, fire near Redding fire like Redding area fire fire near Redding like you

know like anything I could possibly find out and there was like nothing and so I went to sleep and Jeff he woke me up at like 9 30 or 10 and he was just like hey babe you know not to be alarmed or anything like that. And before I could even get the next words out. Before he even said anything, I said, we're going to have to leave, aren't we? And he said, I don't want to alarm you, but I think we might just want to start thinking about it. There's a chance we might have to leave today. We have to just watch it because it's, know you can see it getting closer there's this very odd thing that happens when there is an impending catastrophe it's like a

movie you you get excited almost like oh gosh like the fire is getting close and oh we should get our stuff and you know like like you get this very strange emotion and it wasn't like, Oh, we're excited for a house to burn down. It was like, that's the only word that we could put on it. It was like adrenaline mixed with nervousness mixed with, Oh my gosh. And then I think around three 30, it was still clearly growing and it and the smoke was getting closer you could actually see flames from our neighborhood um you know in just engulfing some of the trees and we noticed um some of our neighbors started you know packing up some stuff we were talking to them and we kind of just decided you know what let's let's just pack up some stuff. We were talking to them and we kind of just decided, you know what, let's, let's just pack up some stuff that we need, that we absolutely need and get it in our cars. And so I started pulling pictures off the walls and putting it onto the kitchen floor. And Jeff

said, you know, my husband said, do we really need to be doing that? And I said, these are our wedding photos. I said, we, yeah. I said I said we yeah I said I don't care I don't care if I look silly having my car packed with wedding photos and we just have to go back home it was kind of like crap if this comes you know we're we could lose everything here at that point we just um packed our cars full of what we could, of just the stuff that we needed. You know, passports, papers, some computers, hard drives. You know, we threw the cats in the car, drove 20 minutes south, dropped them off at the Humane Society, and went to dinner. And we kind of, I think, got lost and didn't really focus too much on it

just kind of checked out until about seven and then when we came out of dinner an hour and a half later we both had notifications on our phone please be advised your area is now under mandatory evacuation and we said okay all right what's up guys? I usually don't do this type of stuff. My husband and I got on his Instagram and did an Instagram live. Wildfires that are getting, unfortunately, really close to our house. Redding, California right now is freaking madness. And I, please pray we came to the main intersection that you need to get through to get to our home and it was gridlocked there was people

throwing things into their car like literally throwing things into their car throwing pets honestly it looked like a war zone. And in the background of all this chaos, you can feel the rumble and you can almost hear it in the background. And I rolled down my window and I asked the police officer goes, keep going, keep going in a really panicked state. And I said, no, no, we live here. And he was screaming at us to leave, leave, get out of here. People are trapped. You have to leave. And I finally said the video, you know, stops after I said, I just said, I can't drive anymore. I need you to drive. So we have three kids and we went to where the kids were at.

They were with family. So we, we got them in time out. We finally left Reading and went down to Sacramento because there were, there was nowhere to stay between Reading and Sacramento is about 120 miles and there was no hotels. We called everywhere and they were all full from people evacuating. And so we just kind of ended up in Sacramento at one of our favorite hotels. My wife was on the Internet 24-7

just trying to see if she could find anything. There was this guy that was posting on Facebook. One of our neighbors snuck in from the river trail to see if his house had made it. Hi, I'm in such and such area. If anybody wants me to go see if your house is still here, leave a comment. I sent him like every message possible

and just said, can you please go to our address? Like I gave him our address. Can you please go? And I caught him right as he was leaving. And he said, I'm so sorry. We can't get in there. And I was like, you know, every video that we were seeing every video, it was like, you wanted to force the people taking the video just to turn left. Like I kept saying, please just turn left because if they just had turned left, you would see our house. My husband very sweetly said like, you need to stop. And he said, you need to get some rest. And I kind of just said, okay, one more, you know, just one more, like just one more.

And I refreshed Facebook and I had a message. So I opened it, and it was from that guy who had snuck in and done the Facebook Live video. And he just said, you know, I'm so sorry. Like, he had, like, those big flashlights, like those, like, industrial-sized flashlights. And he had taken video, and you can clearly see our home in the background, just not there. There's Tim's, and there's the ones across the street are all gone. It took Jeff a minute. Are you sure that's our house? Let's look just to make sure, and it was. dusted so the last week has been really hard since we found out it's been really hard to find a house and and all the stuff that's in our car is all the stuff that we own you know I

can't tell you how many times we both have found ourselves going oh I have that at home you know simple little things I was looking for bobby pins and I was like oh it's okay I just bought a whole new thing that's on my bathroom counter I don don't have a bathroom counter anymore. You know, we travel a lot. And so being in hotels is not unfamiliar. You know, having all of our stuff in our car for days at a time while we're driving is not unfamiliar. But in that moment, we always say, I can't wait to go home. Or, oh, we're on our way home. And there's none of that. We can't go home or oh we're on our way home and and there's none of that we can't go home I don't personally have a website, but I have a few favorites I could tell you about. One of them is www.warnerbros.com slash archive slash space jam slash movie slash jam dot htm.

Let me just make sure that works. Yep, that's it. You might be wondering, space jam, like that movie that came out in the 90s with Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny? And the answer to your question is yes. The original website, for some reason, has been archived, and it's like getting into the DeLorean and traveling back in time. It's a wonderful thing.

It will bring you joy. Another thing that might bring you joy is building your own website at squarespace.com. If you go to Squarespace and use the code EXPLAINED, you'll get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Another great website is netflix.com slash EX. It's a great site to find out more about Vox's new Netflix show. New episodes drop every Wednesday, and it's Wednesday, and the new episode is about astrology. Do zodiac signs actually prescribe your fate, or is it all a crock? Take a look at the science, the history, and the lore of astrology on the new Netflix show, Explained, from Vox. Umair Irfan, you report on the environment at Vox. California is on fire again. What are the details right now?

Well, it's not just California. Much of the West from Alaska to Mexico is on fire, but California definitely is feeling the heat. We are going to begin with fast-moving developments on fast-moving fires. Right now, we have the Carr fire burning near Redding. Entire neighborhoods incinerated in just minutes. That's burned about 172,000 acres. It's killed seven people. Then there's the Ferguson fire burning near Yosemite National Park.

The Ferguson fire is now the largest fire in the Sierra National Forest history. And it has forced Yosemite National Park to close parts of it indefinitely. And then there's the Mendocino Complex fire. So big the smoke can be seen from outer space will likely burn for the rest of the month. At more than 300,000 acres, it's the biggest wildfire recorded in California history. That's bigger than the entire area of Los Angeles. It is one of 17 large fires burning in the state. Damn. Do we know what started all these fires?

Was it human interaction? Was it nature? Certainly human activity is involved. In the case of the Carr fire, officials have attributed the ignition to the mechanical failure of a vehicle in their language. And the Cranston fires that were burning near Los Angeles, those were attributed to arson. But it'll take some time to trace back the roots of the other fires that are going on. But we know from last year's fires, some of those were triggered by downed power lines. And now the utility that serves the area, Pacific Gas and Electric, is facing upward of $2.5 billion in claims. Has California even had the time to recover from all of its fires from last year before these ones started? I mean, these fires were trailing into like October, right? They were burning into January.

Fire officials don't talk about fire seasons anymore. They talk about fire years. Certainly these firefighters now are spending weeks and weeks away from home on fires. Fire season in California is now considered to be year round. And then this summer, it hasn't just been California, right? We're seeing these videos of these insane fires in Greece. Yeah, these fires killed more than 90 people. Greece has issued an urgent appeal for help

in battling the worst fires they've seen there since 2007. There are fires as far north as the Arctic Circle in Sweden. The Arctic Circle. Inside the Arctic Circle, yeah. Much of Circle? Inside the Arctic Circle, yeah. Much of Europe is facing a heat wave right now. I think Lisbon, Portugal just this week posted its highest temperature recorded ever, north of 111 degrees Fahrenheit. There's been a lack of moisture this year as well, so it's hot and it's dry all over the continent at the same time, which is unusual. These wildfires used to, I mean, having lived in California for many years,

I remember them being a good thing. There were these controlled fires that fire departments would actually light. Can these fires be good? Obviously not when people are dying. Well, fires are a natural part of the ecosystem. This is something that some plants actually count on, the jack pine and the buckthorn, they count on fires to actually produce seeds and germinate. So it's something that will occur naturally even when we're not there. The problem is that, one, humans are building in high-risk areas.

So our lives and our property are now more at risk. And we're engaging in some behaviors that suppress fires for years at a time that allow that fuel to accumulate and make it much more devastating when they do actually occur. And in California, you know where real estate is really expensive. Cities don't want to build upward, so they're building outward. And so there's a lot more sprawl. There's a lot more blurring in what they call the wildland-urban interface. Okay. This is the boundary between what we would consider human civilization and the

wilderness. And as people are building further and further out, that line gets blurred. And that means increasingly we're exposed to these fire risks. Some researchers have estimated that by 2050, 645,000 homes in California are going to be in very high wildfire severity zones. And how much worse does this picture get when you factor in the warming climate? Climate change is definitely a big factor, and we're already seeing sub-signals of that right now. Researchers estimate that about 50% of the wildfires in Northern California off the Sierra Nevada

are linked to changes in the climate. We're not seeing a robust signal in Southern California where they're mainly burning through shrubland and grassland, but scientists do project that they will see an increase in burned area by mid-century this year. What's the road ahead for California look like? I mean, is this current fire in Mendocino County just the next biggest fire in California's history before the next one? That's a distinct possibility. Yeah. I mean, we're definitely going to see temperatures

continuing to rise. We're definitely going to see populations continuing to grow, which means that the likelihood of a human being igniting a fire in a very fire-prone region is going to continue to increase. And is there any possibility that this gets under control? There are some efforts underway to do prescribed burns where they deliberately ignite these fires in a controlled way to ensure that they burn out in smaller increments rather than in these huge conflagrations. In Europe, I mean, they're also looking – dealing with these issues as well.

Some forest managers are talking about deliberately engineering forests in a way that makes them more fire-resistant, changing the kinds of trees that are growing there or the vegetation in such a way that makes them more drought resistant or less fire prone. Is that really the solution? Like they have to change how, what the boundaries of forests or the type of trees you find in forests, that's the way we're going to fix this? I mean, short of stopping climate change altogether, yeah. I think that's really, we're going to have to adapt to a certain extent. I mean, some of the warming that we're seeing is baked in, even if we zeroed out greenhouse gas emissions right now. And again, it's not just climate change. It's also how we interact with these wildfires. That's how we interact with the wilderness around us. When we deal with fires

in an urban environment or in a suburban environment. Our goal is to put the fire out. It's to protect human life and human property at all costs. But in a wildland fire, you want that fire to burn. It's part of nature. And so when you end up in a situation where you have the wildland overlapping with human society, you have these conflicting priorities. You have a priority of wanting to let these fires burn and fulfill their natural goals, and you have this priority of wanting to protect human life and property.

What happens when they come into conflict? That's kind of what we're seeing right now. And this conflict is going to get worse. Umair Irfan reports on the environment for Vox. You heard from Hayes and Jeff Schneeweiss at the top of the show. They've relocated to Chico, California with their three kids and their three cats. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Squarespace has lots of beautiful templates made by world-class designers to help you make your website dreams a reality. You can customize them if you don't quite like the reality you see at squarespace.com.

That's the place to go look for a free trial. And you can use the offer code EXPLAIN to save 10% on your first purchase of a website or domain.