The California Fire Season By Valentin M. Kostelnik
In mid-August, 2020, my family and I were eating dinner on our porch, chatting and enjoying the view of the forested ridge next to our house as it glowed in the evening light. It had been a warm, dry, hazy day, typical for a California summer. Then, strangely, I felt a raindrop on my face. Looking up in surprise, I saw a low, dark storm cloud rolling towards us. (Woodward Fire, August 2020. Taken by Maia Perry.)
CRACK. Lightning struck unexpectedly. My family sprung up to run around in the rain, thrilled by the sudden relief from the endless heat of the summer. The next morning, some friends and I were walking along a beach near my house. In classic West Coast fashion, the beach abutted a line of crumbling cliffs, blocking our view of the world above. Suddenly, the wind shifted and ash was in the air, tumbling down off the cliffs in swirling clouds. I caught a charred twig in my hand, grey and weightless, and in a panic, clawed my way up a deer trail to the top of the cliffs. When I reached the summit, a reddish-brown cloud of smoke rose before me, sweeping down from the raging, lightning-sparked fire in the Woodward Valley seven miles north of us. That same morning, August 16, thousands of Californians woke up to a similar sight. The freak lightning storm my family experienced the night before hit Northern California with more than 12,000 strikes in 24 hours, beginning the worst fire season in the state’s history. The resulting fires capitalized on California’s extremely dry conditions, and immediately strained the state’s firefighting ability. Within the first three days, 2,500 fire engines and 14,000 firefight-
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ers were deployed—nearly all of the state’s resources. In the first week, over a million acres had burned, destroying countless homes, and killing over 20 people. By August 23, it was already the third-worst fire season on record. That week my family prepared for the worst and loaded up two truck beds with our essential belongings. The fire was still far enough away that we did not leave. Climate change has brought intense drought and steadily increasing temperatures to California over the past decades. Though forest fires have always affected the state, the fires of today are larger and more destructive, requiring more resources to fight them. California’s firefighting service is designed so that first responders can immediately react and address fires anywhere in the state. The state is divided into sections that are each watched over by a firefighting agency. CalFire, a state-funded division of the Forest Service, is the largest agency, responsible for the most acreage in the state. In response to worsening fires, CalFire’s budget has grown from 774 million in 2010-11 to a proposed budget of 2.9 billion for 2021-22, with an additional 1.13 billion already drawn from the Emergency Fund this year. Despite this, it is still unable to keep pace with the unprecedented scale of modern fires. (My sister’s horse in the smoke at Luchetti’s ranch, August 2020. Taken by Cass Kostelnik)
Fires are a unique natural disaster because, unlike a hurricane or earthquake, they can be fought, sometimes successfully. In our modern, industrialized society it is natural to assume that if we want to defeat a fire, we can, and this belief is supported by almost a hundred years of successful fire suppression. Between 1930 and 1999, only 600,000 acres burned—the same area that burned in the first four
