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IN THIS ISSUE – “Toppling Dominos in Ways Americans Haven’t Imagined”
FOR THE WEEK ENDING SEPT. 11, 2020
Freak Lightning+Heat+Wind+Drought+Dead Trees = Historic Firestorms
- “Climate Change Smacks California in the Face”
- Ballot Background – Election is Less Than 60 Days Away
- Doing the Math: California v. US in Census Dispute
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week, tailored to your business and advocacy interests. Please feel free to forward.
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Freak Lightning+Heat+Wind+Drought+Dead Trees = Historic Firestorms
San Jose Mercury & CalMatters
Never has so much of California burned. And as powerful winds continue to blast the state, the likelihood of historic fires metastasizing and others exploding looms large for overworked firefighters and exhausted residents.
For months, California’s attention has been rightfully fixed on coronavirus, the worst pandemic in a century. But 2020 is becoming an epic year for wildfires in California, as the state continues to burn and the records continue to fall.
Wildfires have burned more than 3.1 million acres this year — an area approaching the size of Connecticut and the largest amount in California’s recorded history. Six of the 20 largest wildfires in state history are currently raging, including the August Complex Fire, which on Thursday claimed the No. 1 spot at more than 471,000 acres.
California has seen nearly 7,700 fires so far this year, stretching firefighting crews thinner and thinner. On Thursday, around 14,000 firefighters were battling 29 major wildfires, compared to 25 earlier this week. The fires have killed 12 Californians and destroyed more than 3,900 structures. (To keep track of all the current blazes, check out the Los Angeles Times’ fire map.)
One piece of good news, especially after a foreboding day of ash-filled orange skies: More favorable weather conditions are forecasted over the weekend, including lower temperatures and weaker winds. This could help slow fires’ growth, while also giving exhausted firefighters a reprieve from triple-digit temperatures.
What’s driving our record fire year? A combination of heat, freak lightning, drought and overgrown forests, experts say.
A record heat wave tested the state’s electricity grid with near blackouts in recent days. Dry, dangerously windy conditions led PG&E Tuesday to preemptively shut off 172,000 customers in 22 counties in the North Bay and Sierra Nevada until Wednesday to reduce the risk of downed power lines sparking more fires.
“This is a challenging year,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom. “It is historic in terms of magnitude, scope and consequence.”
The good news was that Tuesday afternoon, the trio of massive fires in the greater Bay Area that began three weeks ago during lightning storms was finally near containment. The CZU, SCU and LNU Lightning Complex fires were all more than 80% contained.
But in the Sierra, the Creek Fire roared across forests in the mountains east of Fresno, having burned 143,929 acres with 0% containment, and prompting the National Guard to rescue more than 200 people in daring nighttime helicopter missions. The Dolan Fire in Big Sur nearly doubled in size between Monday and Tuesday, charring more than 73,000 acres. And the August Complex Fire continued to grow in the Mendocino National Forest, reaching a staggering 356,312 acres while only being 24% contained.
Fire experts say it’s not one thing causing the shocking series of infernos. “It’s a perfect storm of factors that have all come together,” said Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey at Sequoia National Park.
The main factors are:
1) A dry winter
On April 1, the statewide Sierra snowpack was just 54% of its historical average. Last year it was 161%, and California ended up with a below-average fire year.
The same is true with rainfall. Since Oct. 1, San Francisco has received just 50% of its historic average rainfall, San Jose 49%, Oakland 42% and Sacramento 53%. Los Angeles and San Diego, by contrast, have had a normal rainfall year.
When California has dry winters, moisture levels dry up earlier in the summer in grasses, shrubs and trees. Fires start more easily and spread faster.
“In years when we have below normal rainfall, we are more likely to have greater amounts of acreage burn,” said Jan Null, a meteorologist with Golden Gate Weather Services in Half Moon Bay. “That’s the data.”
2) Unhealthy forests
California’s historic drought stretched from 2012 to 2017. In the Sierra, it left 147 million dead trees, according to aerial surveys. Now fires are exploding through those Ponderosa pine forests, roaring across the tree tops, creating their own weather.
“When you have severe drought that causes die back of woody vegetation, it leaves a legacy on the landscape that persists for many years after the drought is over,” Keeley said.
Add to that, firefighters put out fires for 100 years in many areas across California and the West. Before the Gold Rush, those forests, particularly in the Sierra, burned every decade or two from lightning strikes, thinning out dead wood and brush.
Last month, California and the U.S. Forest Service signed an agreement to thin up to 1 million acres a year using logging and controlled burns. But that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and experts estimate there are up to 20 million acres that need to be treated to restore natural conditions.
3) Lightning
In mid-August, a series of freak summer storms blasted California with more than 14,000 lightning strikes and almost no rain. More than one-third of all the acres that have burned this year came from that lightning.
“I’ve never seen a lightning storm come in and have a bulls eye on the greater Bay Area and beyond. It’s extraordinarily rare,” said Scott Stephens, a UC Berkeley fire scientist. “It overwhelms all the fire management agencies we have.”
4) Heat waves
Labor Day Weekend brought one of California’s hottest periods ever observed. Temperatures hit 121 degrees in Los Angeles County, and 112 in Livermore, 111 in Napa, 112 in Redding, and 117 in Paso Robles, all records. Three weeks earlier, another heat wave sent the mercury soaring to levels nearly as high, with 105 degrees on the coast in Santa Cruz. Extreme heat means drier vegetation, and more difficulty putting out fires.
5) Climate change
The 10 hottest years globally since modern records began in 1880 all have occurred since 1998, according to NASA and NOAA. Heat waves are becoming more frequent and more intense.
Climate change from human activity nearly doubled the area that burned in forest fires in the American West between 1984 and 2015, according to a study in 2016 by scientists at Columbia University and the University of Idaho.
“No matter how hard we try, the fires are going to keep getting bigger, and the reason is really clear,” said Park Williams, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, at the time. “Climate is really running the show.”
The solution? More forest thinning, better building codes, more renewable energy, a more robust power grid, experts say. In the short term? Be careful with fire. And pray for rain.
“The risk will be there until we get a significant rain,” Null said. “Which is usually early November.”
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/09/08/california-fires-five-reasons-why-this-year-is-so-bad/
“Climate Change Smacks California in the Face”
New York Times
Multiple mega fires burning more than three million acres. Millions of residents smothered in toxic air. Rolling blackouts and triple-digit heat waves. Climate change, in the words of one scientist, is smacking California in the face.
The crisis in the nation’s most populous state is more than just an accumulation of individual catastrophes. It is also an example of something climate experts have long worried about, but which few expected to see so soon: a cascade effect, in which a series of disasters overlap, triggering or amplifying each other.
“You’re toppling dominoes in ways that Americans haven’t imagined,” said Roy Wright, who directed resilience programs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency until 2018 and grew up in Vacaville, Calif., near one of this year’s largest fires. “It’s apocalyptic.”
The same could be said for the entire West Coast this week, to Washington and Oregon, where towns were decimated by infernos as firefighters were stretched to their limits.
California’s simultaneous crises illustrate how the ripple effect works. A scorching summer led to dry conditions never before experienced. That aridity helped make the season’s wildfires the biggest ever recorded. Six of the 20 largest wildfires in modern California history have occurred this year.
If climate change was a somewhat abstract notion a decade ago, today it is all too real for Californians. The intensely hot wildfires are not only chasing thousands of people from their homes but causing dangerous chemicals to leach into drinking water. Excessive heat warnings and suffocating smoky air have threatened the health of people already struggling during the pandemic. And the threat of more wildfires has led insurance companies to cancel homeowner policies and the state’s main utility to shut off power to tens of thousands of people pre-emptively.
“If you are in denial about climate change, come to California,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said last month.
Officials have worried about cascading disasters. They just did not think they would start so soon.
“We used to worry about one natural hazard at a time,” said Alice Hill, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who oversaw resilience planning on the National Security Council during the Obama administration. “The acceleration of climate impacts has happened faster than even we anticipated.”
Climate scientists say the mechanism driving the wildfire crisis is straightforward: Human behavior, chiefly the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil, has released greenhouse gases that increase temperatures, desiccating forests and priming them to burn.
Mark Harvey, who was senior director for resilience at the National Security Council until January, said the government had struggled to prepare for situations like what was happening in California.
“The government does a very, very bad job looking at cascading scenarios,” Mr. Harvey said. “Most of our systems are built to handle one problem at a time.”
In some ways, this year’s wildfires in California have been decades in the making. A prolonged drought that ended in 2017 was a major reason for the death of 163 million trees in California forests over the past decade, according to the U.S. Forest Service. One of the fastest-moving fires this year ravaged the forests that had the highest concentration of dead trees, south of Yosemite National Park.
Further north, the Bear Fire became the 10th largest in modern California history — burning through an astonishing 230,000 acres in one 24-hour period.
“It’s really shocking to see the number of fast-moving, extremely large and destructive fires simultaneously burning,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. “I’ve spoken to maybe two dozen fire and climate experts over the last 48 hours and pretty much everyone is at a loss of words. There’s certainly been nothing in living memory on this scale.”
While the state mobilizes to deal with the immediate threats, the fires will also leave California with difficult and costly longer-term problems, everything from the effects of smoke inhalation to damaged drinking water systems.
Wildfire smoke can in the worst cases be deadly, especially among older people. Studies have shown that when waves of smoke hit, the rate of hospitalizations rises, and patients experience respiratory problems, heart attacks and strokes.
The coronavirus pandemic adds a new layer of risk to an already perilous situation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued statements warning that people with Covid-19 are at increased risk from wildfire smoke during the pandemic.
“The longer we have bad air in California, the more we’ll be concerned about adverse health effects,” said John Balmes, a spokesman for the American Lung Association and a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
As for drinking water, scientists have known for years that runoff from burned homes can put harmful chemicals into ground water and reservoirs. But research in the aftermath of the 2017 wildfires in wine country north of San Francisco and the 2018 fire that destroyed the town of Paradise in the foothills of the Sierra discovered a different threat: Benzene and other dangerous contaminants were found inside water systems, possibly from heat-damaged plastics in the water infrastructure.
“Communities need to recognize this vulnerability,” said Andrew J. Whelton, a professor in environmental engineering at Purdue University, and an author of a study on water contamination in Paradise.
“Dangerous chemicals can leach from inside water systems for months after a fire.”
The Environmental Protection Agency classifies water with benzene levels above 500 parts per billion as hazardous. Some samples in Paradise after the fire were found to have 2,000 parts per billion. In Sonoma County after the wine country fires some samples had 40,000 parts per billion, Dr. Whelton said.
Before now, many Californians assumed it would be an earthquake that might knock out their power, damage their homes and render their neighborhoods uninhabitable.
Susan Luten, a retired lawyer in Oakland, lives near the Hayward fault, an area that seismologists warn is due for a major earthquake. But it is the threat of fire that prompted her and her husband to put their go bags by the door — shoes, a change of clothes, flashlights, whistles, medications, small bills and duct tape.
“We have a rope inside the house in case we have to escape down the steep hillside on foot rather than by driving a car,” Ms. Luten said. Her husband studied Google Maps for escape routes.
The whiplash of the multiple crises in California has played out in their living room.
“Two days ago we were roasting inside with the windows closed in a heat wave to avoid heavy smoke,” Ms. Luten said.
“Today we are cool, but unable to see across the street,” she said on Wednesday, when the entire San Francisco Bay Area was shrouded in a faint orange glow, the sun obscured by massive columns of smoke in the atmosphere. “Combine all of this with a pandemic and political menace and it’s hard not to think we are unwitting bit players in some sort of end-of-days movie.”
Emily Szasz, a graduate art history student from Santa Cruz, said she felt like she was in a strange, unfamiliar land.
“I feel as though I’m somewhere I’ve never been before,” Ms. Szasz said. “There were wildfires occasionally throughout my life here, which would be quickly fought and contained. Never do I remember 23 straight days of orange, oppressive, smoky skies, leaving my house in fear that I’d never return to it, or knowing someone whose home burned down in the mountains near my house.”
Several years ago, as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, a professor explained that California and the West were likely to experience the effects of climate change sooner than the rest of the country, Ms. Szasz said. The words now resonate with her.
“There is no greater proof, nor should we require it, that climate change is here and is changing our lives,” Ms. Szasz said of the wildfires. “I am only 25 years old and I do not know what future there is for me, let alone my potential children and grandchildren.”
Even after this year’s fires are put out, their ripple effects will keep spreading, creating economic shocks — in the insurance industry and with the state’s power grid, to name two examples — well beyond the physical and health damage of the disasters themselves.
This summer millions of Californians’ homes went dark for an hour or more as the smothering summer heat threatened to overload the grid.
Those blackouts are separate from the pre-emptive shutoffs carried out by California utilities in an effort to prevent their equipment from sparking wildfires. This week, Pacific Gas and Electric turned off power to about 170,000 customers — a continuation of a program of extensive power shut-offs that began last year.
In the insurance industry, years of heavy losses have pushed companies to pull back from fire-prone areas, in what state officials call a crisis of its own. A lack of affordable insurance threatens to devastate housing markets, by making homes less valuable and harder to sell.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, which represents insurers, said the industry was waiting to see how big this year’s losses were, and what the state does next.
“We have to use it as a clarion call,” said Mr. Wright, the former FEMA official who is now president of the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, an industry-funded group that looks at how to reduce damage from disasters. “What we can’t do is simply cover our ears, hunker down and go, ‘I just want this to go away.’”
Philip B. Duffy, a climate scientist who is president of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, said many people did not understand the dynamics of a warming world.
“People are always asking, ‘Is this the new normal?’” he said. “I always say no. It’s going to get worse.”
Ballot Background – Election is Less Than 60 Days Away
CalMatters
With the November election less than 60 days away and a record 21 million Californians registered to vote, it’s time to brush up on everything you need to know before casting your ballot this fall and making decisions that could transform the Golden State for years.
This is the highest rate of registration since the election of 1940, according to a report from voter data firm Political Data Inc.
The influx of registrations means 83% of eligible Californians are registered to vote. The last time it was that high was in 1940, when the rate was slightly higher than 83%, according to the data firm.
Nearly two-thirds of the new registrations are millennials or Generation Y, born after 1996, the report found. Young voters represent about 37% of total registrants, while baby boomers – those born between 1946 and 1964 – represent 29% of total registrations, the report said.
Ballot briefing:
Doing the Math: California v. US in Census Dispute
New York Times
The tortuous course of the 2020 census, first slowed by the coronavirus pandemic and then placed on a fast track by the Trump administration, took yet another twist on when a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration’s order to wrap up the count a month ahead of schedule.
Judge Lucy H. Koh of the United States District Court in Northern California halted plans for an early finish to the head-counting portion of the census at least until a mid-September hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to scrap the expedited schedule altogether. Noting that the Census Bureau already has begun to dismantle counting operations in some places where it considers the count complete, the judge effectively said the plaintiffs’ suit could be overtaken by events if the wind-down of the count was not suspended.
“Because the decennial census is at issue here, an inaccurate count would not be remedied for another decade,” Judge Koh wrote.
The National Urban League, the League of Women Voters and a host of advocacy groups and local governments filed the suit last month. They argue that the order to end the head-counting portion of the census early will lead to an inaccurate tally that will cost some communities both political representation and millions of federal dollars that are allotted based on population totals.
The court order throws another wrench into a census that already was the most ill-starred and politically freighted tally since at least 1920, when a Republican-dominated Congress refused outright to accept a population count that would have shifted political power to Democratic cities.
As Covid-19 swept the nation this spring, the bureau was forced to postpone key parts of its population count until August. The Trump administration said at the time that it would extend the deadline for completing the count to October 31 to make up for that delay, and move the date for delivering population totals to the White House to April 2021, from its current December 31 deadline.
But as census outreach prepared to resume last month, the administration reversed course, ordering the count wrapped up by September 30, and delivery of totals by December 31. The apparent reason was that the administration wants to exclude noncitizens from the population totals that will be sent to Congress early next year for reallocating seats in the House of Representatives and drawing political boundaries nationwide.
But the Census Bureau can only deliver population totals to the White House by December 31 if it shortens the time spent counting residents. And with an uphill battle to win a second term in the election in November, Mr. Trump can be assured of control over population totals only if they are delivered to the White House by that deadline.
Critics have called that a baldly political attempt to create a whiter, more Republican-leaning population total for use in reapportionment and redistricting. The lawsuit opposing the shortened deadline said as much, saying the schedule suggested it was devised “to facilitate another illegal act: suppressing the political power of communities of color by excluding undocumented people from the final apportionment count.”
An array of experts, including former Census Bureau directors, have warned that the earlier deadlines could not be met without shortcuts that would lead to a dramatically less accurate census — in particular, a census that would miss the poor, the young and minority groups who are traditionally the hardest to count.
The census official in daily charge of the count, Albert E. Fontenot Jr., testified in a deposition that the bureau was on schedule to complete the biggest part of its remaining count — the tally of non-responding households by an army of 235,000 door-knockers — by the end of September. Mr. Fontenot said the bureau had counted more than 60 percent of those non-responders as of September 1, and 84 percent of all households overall.
He also said that the bureau planned to speed up its data processing operations by eliminating “redundant quality control operations,” delaying some work until after initial population figures are sent to the White House and cutting 21 days from time allotted for “subject matter expert review and software error remediation,” among other moves.
“These changes increase the risk the Census Bureau will not identify errors during post processing in time to fix them,” he said. But, he added, “the Census Bureau is confident that it can achieve a complete and accurate census and report apportionment counts” by December 31.
In her ruling blocking the wind-down of the count, Judge Koh noted that senior census officials had come to the opposite conclusion this summer. In fact, she writes, Mr. Fontenot “acknowledged publicly less than two months ago that the bureau was “past the window of being able to get accurate counts to the President by December 31.”