CALIFORNIA LEAVIN’
‘ I’m still enamoured of 300 days of sun and 840 miles of coast... even if the air is often too toxic to enjoy them’
is “forgotten, left- behind”. Despite months of lockdowns and restricted social interaction, California now has the most Covid- 19 cases of any US state: 787,000 and rising – more than double the UK’s toll.
And with global warming, wildfires are becoming an annual phenomenon.
California suffered record heat last week, with Los Angeles suburb Woodland Hills hitting 49.4C, hotter than Abu Dhabi. A record 3.5 million acres have burned in the state in recent days, killing at least 29 people, with no end in sight.
“It has never been this hot, it has never been this smoky,” says climate scientist Zeke Hausfather.
After wildfires strip the hillsides, winter rains are expected to bring devastating mudslides, as they did in 2018 when Prince Harry and Meghan’s new £ 11.4million California home in Montecito only narrowly escaped a deadly torrent of debris. In some ways, the California Dream has become the search for the perfect evacuation route in case of fire, flood or mudslide. Meanwhile, the Big One, as the next earthquake has been dubbed, is long overdue. Seismologists say the San Andreas fault is “12 months pregnant”. An earthquake that shook Los Angeles on Friday night measured 4.6 on the Richter Scale, rattling everyone’s nerves. Soaring homelessness has become a catastrophe for those living on the streets and a lament for those whose homes are suddenly flanked by tent cities littered with trash, used hypodermic syringes and transients defecating on sidewalks and lawns. Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame, largely deserted of tourists, has been slowly overtaken by the homeless. Tent cities are clustered beneath almost every freeway underpass and along beaches and rivers.
The explosion in homelessness has led to a rise in what California Governor Gavin Newsom calls “medieval diseases” spread by rats and fleas, including typhus, hepatitis A, and tuberculosis.
“Our homelessness crisis is rapidly becoming a public health crisis,” he admits.
Yet under pandemic regulations many police forces are powerless to move the homeless.
Well- intentioned social reform efforts in San Francisco that decriminalized homelessness, and gave addicts access to free drug paraphernalia, methadone, cannabis and alcohol, have seen homelessness soar 20 per cent since the start of the pandemic.
And more than two- thirds of California’s homeless suffer from mental illness, a study found last year. Protests against police brutality and in support of Black Lives matter have ignited riots and looting across California. Crime is on the rise, and neighbourhood crime- watch websites overflow daily with reports of car break- ins, burglaries and home intruders.
CALIFORNIA has the world’s fifth largest economy, yet can hardly keep the lights on. This month the state’s three largest power companies cut off electricity to more than 410,000 homes.
Home prices have soared in the last decade with the tech boom – up 70 per cent in Los Angeles and 116 per cent in San Francisco – driving out the middle and working- classes.
Yet as residents flee San Francisco, online property website Zillow reports an incredible 96 per cent increase in housing now available for sale or rent.
The mass exodus from California has the rest of America terrified that newcomers could be taking jobs, driving up housing costs, and changing local politics with progressive West Coast ideas.
Mayoral candidate Wayne Richie, in Boise, Idaho, jokily proposed building a £ 20million wall to keep Californians out of town. In neighbouring Arizona, residents complain of an influx of California licence plates. And still they come.
Jon Gabriel, of Mesa, Arizona, says: “I receive a couple of messages a week from contacts all over California asking where they should move to in Arizona.
“My neighbours are experiencing the same.”
As the pandemic has bankrupted thousands of businesses, many see the state taking years to recover – even once coronavirus is finally under control.
After three decades living in California, I am still enamoured of its 300 days of sunshine a year, the natural beauty of its mountains and oceans and its 840 miles of spectacular coastline. Even if the air is often too toxic to enjoy them, I’m not ready to pack my bags just yet.
But for those thinking of leaving, former California Governor Jerry Brown depressingly warns that the rest of America is just as bad, with tornadoes in the mid- west, hurricanes in the south east and crippling cold winters in the northern states.
“Where are you going to go?” he asks. “There are going to be problems everywhere in the United States.”
For all its own troubles, Britain is looking awfully enticing right now.
A right ding- dong ... Linda and Anne, below
SINGER Linda Nolan has followed cancer- stricken sister Anne by also “ringing the bell” on her gruelling chemotherapy.
The siblings – part of pop group The Nolans – received their diagnoses within days of each other and both began treatment at Blackpool’s Victoria Hospital, in July.
Anne, 69, rang the bell last month after finishing her treatment and Linda delighted her fans at the weekend by tweeting: “I rang the bell today!”
Anne, who will now have either a mastectomy or lumpectomy followed by radiotherapy, found out she had stage three breast cancer in April, 20 years after being first diagnosed with it.
The mother- of- two said: “I don’t want to die. I love my life so much. I want to live for as long as I possibly can.”
Linda, 61, has incurable liver cancer but hopes the chemotherapy can extend her life in a battle against a disease which killed sister Bernie, 52, in 2013.
She said: “I look in the mirror now and I see Bernie. It just brings back all of her trauma.”