Orange skies expose California’s darkness
Toxic conditions caused by rampant wildfires add to Covid woe for residents of troubled San Francisco
Olivia Rudgard
IT’S not unusual for San Franciscans to wake up to hazy skies and poor air quality during California’s annual autumn fire season.
But on Wednesday morning the city and surrounding areas were blanketed in a thick coat of orange smoke. The sun never rose, the sky never cleared, and darkness reigned for the day.
The apocalyptic images instantly became a visceral symbol of climate change, which scientists say is partly to blame for the increasing intensity of the fires.
Among the city’s weary residents there was a sense of exhaustion. Californians have already dealt with weeks of toxic air and wildfire smoke, on top of one of the longest and harshest Covid-19 lockdowns implemented anywhere in the world.
Outside Martha and Bros Coffee on 24th Street, residents of the city’s wellheeled Noe Valley neighbourhood clutched their bagels and takeaway coffees and looked anxiously at the darkness above. “That helplessness I think is the hardest thing about it,” said photo stylist Jane Hartmann, 53, a 30year resident of the city.
San Francisco is an expensive city, and even before Covid-19 it wasn’t always an easy place to live. Residents complained about unaddressed homelessness and public drug use, poor street hygiene, crime and traffic.
Now residents are under a double lockdown, hiding indoors from both Covid-19 and the poor air quality, which has reached hazardous levels over the past few weeks. Air purifiers are out of stock in local home improvement stores, but for many the best solution is simply to leave.
The foreboding skies are because the Bay Area’s thick marine layer is holding large amounts of smoke from several nearby wildfires high above the ground. Those smoke particles scatter blue light, which has a shorter wavelength, and only allow through the red light, leading to an eerie orange glow.
It’s not inherently dangerous, but it’s indicative of the sheer volume of smoke being emitted by dozens of fires burning across the state.
Fire is a normal part of the ecological system here, but it’s increasingly happening at record-breaking scale and speed. California has seen 2.5million acres burn this year, almost 20 times more than at the same point last year. The fire season doesn’t typically even start until October. An unusual dry lightning storm and extremely high temperatures haven’t helped. Temperature records have been smashed across the state, with Death Valley reaching 54.4C (130F) last month.
Traumatised residents rebuild only to see their new homes destroyed. This week residents of Paradise, a town razed by a deadly wildfire two years ago, were forced to evacuate once again. At least six people have died in the fires so far, with two children thought to be among them.
Officials warned that more deaths would likely be reported in the coming days as many areas were currently impossible to reach. Five towns have been burned to the ground just north in Oregon, while further north still, Washington saw 330,000 acres burn in a single day – more than most recent entire fire seasons.
“This year is definitely one of the worst on record in my memory, and we’re not even really in the core of the wildfire season yet,” Paul Ullrich, associate professor of regional climate modelling at the University of California, Davis, said.
He added that the traditionally foggy and cool northern part of the state was undergoing a transition to become more like the southern part – hotter, drier and more prone to fires.
He predicts that rural communities will begin to empty out as people struggle to live with the annual threat of wildfires.
“I fully anticipate that folks are gonna no longer see the wildland interface as a possible place to live.
Under particular threat is California’s backcountry, including the Sierra Nevada mountains and even the worldfamous Yosemite National Park, which saw its own skies turn orange over the weekend, filled with smoke and ash from the nearby Creek fire. Hundreds of holidaymakers and campers trapped by that fire, which at the time of writing had burned 163,138 acres and counting, were forced to hike to safety or be airlifted out.
The forest service closed all of California’s national forests on Wednesday, citing “unprecedented and historic fire conditions throughout the state”.
A study released earlier this week by the University of California found that extremely high temperatures in southern California’s Coachella Valley could deter “snowbird” tourists who come south to escape the freezing winter temperatures elsewhere in the US.
It could also threaten the region’s famous music festival, with attendees more likely to be exposed to extreme heat if temperatures continue to rise.
Rents in San Francisco have plummeted by 14pc since a year ago to their lowest point in six years, and it’s impossible to walk anywhere in the city without encountering parked moving vans packing up people’s belongings.