San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The carnage stalked us after flames
Wildfire burned down our town. Then, people started dying.
Not a single person was killed when the Creek Fire wiped out my neighborhood of Pine Ridge in 2020. As the fire tore through our Fresno County community, 66 out of 88 homes in our tract were destroyed, but no firefighters, law enforcement officers nor civilians were lost. Everyone evacuated safely.
Since the fire ended, however, the story has been different.
Pine Ridge was a small, demographically older community. Our neighbors who passed away, though not young, were made of sturdy stuff nonetheless. Life’s not so easy when you have to plow out the roads in winter that you put down and maintain in summer. No matter what heavy equipment one neighbor or another might own, we all had to lean on one another to get through — and we did.
All told, we have seen a spate of eight deaths since the flames went out. In all these post-fire deaths, relocation stress syndrome, or “transfer trauma,” likely figured prominently — both for evacuees whose homes were destroyed and for those who still had homes to return to. Having our houses burn down in the middle of a pandemic was not something any of us planned for. When it happened, it was a one-two punch that staggered all of us, no matter what our age or health. In the two most recent deaths, complications from COVID-19 were also very much involved — a sadness that further grieved our community.
In the wildfire and the pandemic, the politicization of science and loss played an all-too-conspicuous role.
Underlying everything was a false sense of security. When our neighborhood was evacuated on Sept. 6, none of us thought our homes would burn down. Our area had no historical record of heavy-timber fire. We had done everything the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and local building codes required us to do. And more.
My wife and I had a 100-foot defensible space around our home, sheds and well house, all of which were also literally inside a shaded fuel break. We had steel roofing on all of our structures. Additionally, the house was sided not with wood, but with fiber-cement planks. Like our neighbors, we had taken down the many standing-dead trees killed by beetles and drought. We then had them hauled off by loggers, a thinning of the forest that presumably made us even more fire safe.
But the Creek Fire took everything anyway.
One big reason that our sense of security turned out to be false was that the professional interests and the politics of resource extraction in our area had distorted the science around wildfires. Professional foresters in our area have continually underplayed the “forest” (the big picture of climate change) and overplayed the “trees” (the more local picture of fuel loading and the need for mechanical thinning and prescribed fire). Professional environmentalists in our area have continually done exactly the reverse.
Until the scientific facts surrounding both the trees the forests are attended to — until the history of past fuel loading the catastrophe-modeling of future climate change are taken into account — building and living in the mountains of California will continue to be a very bad bet, no matter what the real estate, construction and other chamber of commerce interests might want us to believe.
A similar “you bet your life” dynamic has prevailed around the COVID-19 pandemic in our area. The solid majority of Pine Ridge residents were very conservative and long prone to distrusting government. Many were anti-mask and a few were anti-vax. Like many other Americans, they readily believed what they heard from their pastors, priests, politicians, social and traditional media personalities, and pundits — even when those sources were playing down the severity of COVID and denied the efficacy of vaccines and masks — while simultaneously playing up junk-science “cures.”
The two neighbors we recently lost to COVID came from separate households. One was 67, a father, grandfather, exNavy SEAL and lifetime heavy-equipment operator possessed of phenomenal skills. The other was a vivacious woman from Ireland, age 81, who immigrated to the U.S. six decades ago, then not only raised her six children with her husband, but also fostered and adopted many more.
Their deaths were, to differing degrees, obscured by the fog of plague. Were they fully vaccinated? No. Hard to learn the finer details, though. No one wants to ask or talk about it because even in our community, that had hung together through tragedy after tragedy, that would be too much.
COVID and our responses to it have divided us. To ask or to talk about COVID with the families who had lost loved ones to the disease would sound not only like trying to score political points, but even like assigning blame to the families for the deaths. And who on Earth knows the truth of that?
Suffice to say that, looking in from the outside, it seemed to us that our two COVID victims should have had many years left to them.
Even now, politics will not let them rest in peace. From those on one end of the spectrum, we’re told that, well, our neighbors had delayed getting fully vaccinated and therefore somehow “deserved” to die. Many of those on the other end of the spectrum refuse to believe that COVID was even a main actor in the deaths. They must have died of “other” causes — comorbid weaknesses — certainly not the virus, since (according to their opinion leaders) the lethality of SARS-CoV-2 could not be anything but an over-reported hype and a hoax.
The complex truths of my neighbors’ lives and deaths are denied by both ends of the political spectrum. They prayed. They hoped against hope. As my own mother also did, in January 2021, in Cincinnati, when she died of respiratory failure related to COVID.
She died just months before before vaccinations became widely available.
The larger tragedy is that, as I write this, more than 200,000 Americans have died of COVID since the vaccine rollout that could have saved my mother’s life. The overwhelming majority of them unvaccinated, for whatever reasons.
Now, with the omicron variant spreading across the globe, even among the vaccinated, the talk is about breakthrough infections, and the hope that even as new variants find their way through our vaccines’ defenses, the results will be less severe than previous incarnations of the disease.
Even in our vaccinated security, more of us too may someday soon find ourselves saying of some future variant what we in Pine Ridge previously said of the Creek Fire: “Why us? We did everything we were supposed to do, and still the disaster took it all.”
We need to stop overplaying the safety of living in the mountains in a time of climate crisis and forest fuels overload. We need to stop underplaying the dangers of living in the age of COVID. We must have the courage to face ever more desperate truths regarding pandemics spreading like wildfires and wildfires spreading like pandemics. Any hope based in a false sense of security will only make matters worse.