Hero

One of my Deputy Chiefs shared this heartbreaking information about one of the fatalities that occurred on the Carr Fire in Redding, California. Redding Fire Inspector Jeremy Stokes was killed while sitting in his Ford F150 pick-up when a fire tornado burned over his location. At the time, he was working in a subdivision, trying to evacuate residents who had not complied with the initial evacuation order. Stokes sent out a mayday reporting that he was about to be burned over, but his transmission was cut off and never regained. Reports and data reviewed from the incident indicate that the fire tornado was over 300 yards wide at the base. Stokes was killed by the traumatic injuries he sustained when his truck was picked up and thrown over 200 feet from where it was originally parked. 

The report goes on to say we are experiencing fire that is burning hotter, faster and with more explosive energy than previously recorded.  It is a bad year. 

Photo of from the Carr Fire:

Blue Skies

Where there is fire, there is smoke. Weeks and weeks of smoke, smoke so thick, we can’t see the mountains that we live in.  Half mile visibility smoke, smoke that makes us turn on our car headlights in the middle of the day. We stay inside all the time and when we venture outside, most of us wear respirator face masks. A woman came into the office today wearing a face mask covered in a bold patterned fabric, safety as fashion statement.  London survived the Great Smog of 1952 and I survived my the nitrogen oxide gloom of my pre-Clean Air Act Southern California childhood, but this feels different.  For one thing, it is not a localized phenomenon. Smoke covers the western half of North America, half a freaking continent. There are fires burning north of the Arctic Circle this summer.  For another thing, this isn’t smog, it is wood smoke. The air smells like a campfire, a scent that sends adrenaline coursing through my body. My nerves snap to attention, a primal reaction that was embedded in my DNA over thousands of generations.  Carbon-based life forms are universally susceptible to fire, we avoid it if possible.  I live in a constant, low-level state of fight-or-flight.

What happens to the next generation, the children being born now? What kind of world are we leaving to them? Will they live in a world in which blue skies are increasingly rare?  How long will it be before blue skies are a fable, a fairy tale? “Once upon a time, the sky was the deepest, most radiant blue that you can imagine and the air was crisp and clean.” They won’t know what that means, won't be able to imagine what that is like.

This is the reckoning for our self-indulgent profligacy, our single serving, plastic wrapped, fast fashion lifestyle. This is the true price of all the worthless crap we create, consume, and dump in the ocean as plastic soup. Oregon's primeval forests have been clear cut and replaced by monoculture conifer plantations, ruler-straight rows of identical trees planted in unnaturally dense stands. The record-breaking heat and aridity turns tree farms into tinder. All it takes is one random, tiny spark from a power line or a car exhaust pipe, one stroke of lighting in these storm-haunted mountains, and we will have a conflagration barreling through the stick-dry Siskiyous like a brakeless freight train. There will be nowhere to run.   

The smoke comes earlier and covers more territory each year, the skies are grey for longer periods of time. The world is changing before our eyes.