Epic forces converge in Steinbeck Country
Monterey County suffers wrath of disaster, pandemic
MONTEREY COUNTY — The west side of the Salinas Valley is shielded from the Pacific Ocean by a vast network of oaklined mountains that John Steinbeck once called “dark and brooding — unfriendly and dangerous.”
“I always found in myself a dread of west and a love of east,” he wrote in the opening chapter of his famous 1952 novel “East of Eden,” commenting on the “birth and death of the day” reflected by the opposite ridges framing either side of the agrarian valley.
Those imposing mountains may have never been as unfriendly and dreadful to so many people as when they began burning in August.
More than 48,000 wooded acres there were blackened by the River Fire, which destroyed or damaged 24 homes and at one point traced a menacing orange line across the western valley ridge. At night, flames were clearly visible from the produce fields below. Tens of thousands of people fled.
It was one of three major fires to besiege Monterey County in recent weeks. None was anywhere near the size of the huge LNU and SCU fire complexes further north, but the way they have intersected with the coronavirus pandemic and climate change reflects some of the most pressing issues facing the entire state.
At about 3 a.m. on Aug. 16, a lightning bolt suddenly struck near River Road and Pine Canyon Road a few miles south of Salinas. Dozens of homes are clustered there at the base of idyllic mountains overlooking the valley where much of the country’s lettuce and spinach is grown.
The next days brought two other nearby fires, one just to the west in Carmel Valley and another near Big Sur, that have burned more than 30,000 acres combined. Those blazes, the Carmel Fire and Dolan Fire, destroyed or damaged at least 56 homes and a condor sanctuary.
Though the county has had larger wildfires before, including in 1977, 2008 and 2016, local officials say they’ve never seen such widespread burning make so many of their residents flee simultaneously.
“This is history,” said Michael Urquides, chief of the Monterey County Regional Fire District. He’s been a firefighter in the area since the late 1980s and has held his current role for about 15 years.
The fires came during an extreme and prolonged heat wave that sent temperatures skyrocketing across the western United States, prompting rolling blackouts in California when the state’s energy supplies proved surprisingly insufficient. Salinas endured several straight days with high temperatures at or above 90 degrees, which has never happened there in August before, according to the National Weather Service.
Monterey County, like the rest of California, can expect extreme heat and intense wildfires to continue, and even worsen, as the world continues warming.
“California is very susceptible to these types of ignitions,” said Rep. Jimmy Panetta, DCarmel Valley. “It’s hotter. It’s drier. We’re more vulnerable.”
The virus, heat and wildfire smoke have all uniquely harmed a group whose labor has been essential to the Salinas Valley since before Steinbeck’s time: the fieldworkers who make the region an agricultural powerhouse.
One recent day, Lauro Barajas, a regional director for United Farm Workers, stopped by a field alongside the road that gave the River Fire its name.
The smoke was so thick, he could barely see more than 150 yards ahead. After about 10 minutes, he found it hard to breathe. Workers picking strawberries had N95 respirator masks, but it was 4:30 p.m., suggesting they had been there for as much as nine hours straight, he said.
“And the temperature was high,” Barajas said. “When you combine all that, the working conditions were pretty tough.”
California workplace safety regulations require employers to protect workers when poor air quality meets certain thresholds because of wildfire smoke. But many of the farms around Salinas scrambled to keep their workers safe from heavy smoke in August. When farmers tried to order masks, some found out they could not get any for months, said Norm Groot, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau.
So the county’s agriculture commissioner helped secure a cache of masks from the state and about 175,000 of them were obtained for use by fieldworkers, Groot said.
Many others who labor outside on California farms did not have that protection. The union said 80% to 85% of the workers it recently surveyed statewide said they did not receive the smokeprotection masks required by law.
Panetta, the congressman, recently sent a letter to Vice President Mike Pence seeking help from the White House with “the timely procurement of safety equipment, including N95 masks” for farmworkers.
Along the aptly named Sky Ranch Road, mountaintop properties offer sweeping views of the Santa Lucia and Sierra de Salinas mountains, along with the Carmel Valley below. Typically, it’s a peaceful and luxurious place. Now, it’s become another tragically Californian scene.
The Carmel Fire ignited nearby at 3 p.m. Aug. 18, and burned nearly 7,000 acres, some of it on Sky Ranch Road. Driving up to the neighborhood these days requires passing through barren hillsides and blackened trees that were once lush and green.
Not all of the properties burned. That’s partly due to the weather, the efforts of firefighters and, perhaps, Thomas Heinemann.
A 23year resident of Sky Ranch Road, Heinemann, 62, stayed behind after the Carmel Fire broke out. He’s a searchandrescue volunteer and is very familiar with devastating wildfires: He was one of the people who searched for human remains after the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa and the 2018 Camp Fire that nearly wiped out Paradise.
During the early stages of the Carmel Fire, Heinemann hopped in a firefighter’s pickup truck to help her get the lay of the land. He drove around on his scooter looking for hot spots. And he cared for the horses, chickens and goats his neighbors had to leave behind.
The situation could have been much worse had the fire ignited later and moved with the same speed as winddriven disasters like the recordsetting Camp Fire, Heinemann noted Tuesday while drawing water from a 300gallon tank to satiate neighborhood animals.
“The escape would be really, really hairy,” Heinemann said. “It would have been something like that, like Paradise.” But it wasn’t. And Sky Ranch Road makes clear how the Monterey County fires avoided an even more damaging path in more ways than one. At one destroyed home, sunset now clearly illuminates a charred mountain range across the Carmel Valley. It’s the southwestern side of the burn scar from the River Fire, which nearly merged with the Carmel Fire as it sent smoke pouring into the Salinas Valley fields.
Smoke exposure is just the latest in a long line of social ills that have fallen at the feet of Salinas Valley farmworkers. While Monterey County is not located within the Bay Area, it’s close enough to have felt the effects of that region’s housing crisis as people scour the state for more affordable living space. The persistently high Salinas housing costs compared to farmworkers’ pay has often resulted in families, or at least generations, living under the same roof.
Those crowded conditions made the coronavirus easier to spread. Among Monterey County’s 7,619 confirmed cases of the virus as of Friday, about 74% of the patients were Hispanic or Latino, county data shows. Nearly half of the total cases are concentrated in two east and north Salinas ZIP codes where many farmworkers live with their families.
Commuting adds another risk.
“Workers get in a bus and sit shoulder to shoulder with each other, or they commute together in a vehicle in order to save money and to get to the right field,” said state Sen. Anna Caballero, DSalinas. “Social distancing becomes very difficult.”
Farmers have implemented precautions to slow the spread of the virus, including masks, an emphasis on handwashing and giving workers more space in the field. But the most effective tool available to other types of businesses — working from home — is impossible on the farms. Fruits and vegetables need to be picked, and Salinas Valley agriculture, with its Mediterranean climate and fertile soil, is a yearround industry.
“The disease has just run
through the Latino farmworker community who also have issues accessing medical care and trusting that, if they get sick, that they’ll be able to get the care that they need,” said Caballero, a former Salinas mayor. “It’s a terrible situation, because we depend on them for our food source, and yet they are bearing the brunt of the coronavirus.”
When the River Fire burned most intensely outside Salinas, a wall of fire and smoke imperiled numerous homes on and near Pine Canyon Road. Yet, as was the case in the Carmel Valley, most of the properties that were threatened were not incinerated.
Stacey Milanesa had long ago fortified her house to resist flames. After she saw how a 100acre fire in the area lit up a eucalyptus tree like a matchstick, Milanesa decided to get a new roof made of stonecoated steel. She later added stronger windows too.
The River Fire destroyed one home on Milanesa’s culdesac and damaged some others. Hers is one of two that remained unscathed as of Monday.
Though the latest round of fires were a more dire threat to her neighborhood than she’d ever seen, Milanesa wasn’t totally surprised, either.
“It’s California,” she said. “They call it the golden hills — I call it brown grass. It’s dry. It burns.”
Less than a mile away from Milanesa’s house, the view from a higher part of the Pine Canyon Road area is much different. The River Fire carved an unsparing path through that stretch of road. Where several homes once stood amid trees overlooking the Salinas Valley, today piles of ash and burnt vegetation clash against the green quilt of produce fields in the distance.
The sight is familiar to many Californians in fire zones: solitary chimneys and remnants of fireplaces surrounded by rubble, twisted metal and burned cars.
On Tuesday, mail carrier Ramon Sabillo drove his U.S. Postal Service truck up to the top of the devastated street, unsure of what he would find there. He was shocked to see the damage along the route he’s driven for 15 years.
“It’s such a beautiful place — all greenery, all trees — now look at it,” he said before turning around. “It’s like we’re in another world.”
If past fires are any indication, however, the burn scar may fade faster than Sabillo realized. Winter rains will come and allow new plants to grow. The green will return, and life on the mountain will persist — as will the everchanging threat of fires in California.