By Valentin M. Kostelnik

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.

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-

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 (Woodward Fire, August 2020. Taken by Maia Perry.) 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. 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

(My sister’s horse in the smoke at Luchetti’s ranch, August 2020. Taken by Cass Kostelnik)

days of the 2020 fire season. In the past few years, Californians have come to realize that no government or reactionary emergency response program can keep fire out of our lives—at least not with the advent of climate change.

The worsening fires are the direct result of a changing climate. It is widely known across the country that California experienced drought conditions, but the cause is often misunderstood. The main driver of the drought is not less precipitation, but rather the combined result of increasingly extreme weather patterns and rising temperatures. The wet years are getting wetter, the dry years are getting drier, and all are getting warmer. Between 2012 and 2015, California experienced the driest four-year period in at least 2000 years and 2017 was one of the wettest years on record. Seventy-five percent of California’s precipitation arrives in the winter, and most of that falls over the Sierra Nevada— ideally as snow. The Sierra snowpack controls the dry season by slowly releasing water throughout the year, but due to rising temperatures, the snowpack has been shrinking in the last decade. Even with a relatively wet winter, California might still find itself in drought come summer.

California’s climate follows a Mediterranean, boombust cycle of precipitation that naturally favors wildfire that many plants have evolved to co-exist with. Ponderosa pines grow serotinous cones that are glued shut and only become viable following a fire, Douglas fir bark grows thick and fire-resistant, and chaparral ecosystems need to burn every 20 to 30 years to remain healthy. Fire can be beneficial to a forest ecosystem by returning nutrients to the soil, priming serotinous cones, clearing underbrush, and keeping a forest from getting too dense. However, if fire is removed from an ecosystem that evolved for it, it can become unhealthy, overgrown, and burn hotter than ever. We see this in forests where a ground fire can become a crown fire, burning an entire tree rather than scorching the lower bark.

As it becomes clearer that fire is a necessity for many ecosystems, experts are calling for prescribed burning, which means lighting a fire at a time and place that allows a forest to respond naturally to it. This is far from a new idea. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples lit fires according to a well-developed management plan designed to keep forests as productive as possible while also preventing uncontrollable fires. White settlers initially adopted some of these practices, but early twentieth century foresters, who were interested in timber harvesting, viewed fire as a purely destructive force. They decided to implement a plan of total fire suppression that survived into the twenty-first century. This was mostly successful in preventing fires in California for nearly a century but is now backfiring as temperatures rise and drought worsens.

Our dense forests are dry tinderboxes and were overdue to burn when the freak lightning storm swept over California. We played in the rain, unaware of the dangerous consequences the storm would have. As it continued north, the storm sparked four of the largest fires in history, including one next to a ranch owned by Peter Luchetti, a close family friend. It spread rapidly and became what is known as the LNU Lightning Complex, the sixth largest California fire in modern history. Fifty miles north, the August Complex

(Luchetti’s ranch, driving towards the fire, August 2020. Taken by Cass Kostelnik.) (Scorched pasture at Luchetti’s ranch, September 2015. Taken by Emily Luchetti.)

became the largest California wildfire ever, and fifty miles south the SCU Complex became the third largest.

Luchetti knew that fire would soon be edging towards his ranch, so when the smoke started pouring over the hills, he called CalFire to ask what the response plan was. They told him that CalFire had reached the point where more resources were being requested than could be provided, and the only thing they could send was a paid private contractor and his bulldozer, ‘Larry the Dozer Guy.’ With minimal state assistance, Luchetti, the ranchers, and Larry built bulldozer fire-lines, strips of bare dirt designed to stop approaching fires.

At one point, Larry realized that without further assistance the approaching fire would jump the line he was building. He called CalFire, and they were able to temporarily release a few firefighters from a nearby town to assist in reinforcing the line. The crew pulled up to the ranch house where Luchetti, my mom, and my sister were waiting to guide them to the fire. They drove out through the backcountry to Larry’s position and, as Luchetti describes it, “tried to get this thing under control.”

The LNU Complex expanded omnidirectionally at extraordinary speeds thanks to parched fuels, and hot, dry, windy weather. In total, six civilians died, 1,421 structures burned, and thousands of acres went up in flames. Three days after the LNU started, I got a chance to see the fire up-close. We brought some water to the fire-line for Larry, who was standing next to his bulldozer watching flames rage through vegetation. With 300,000 acres of ash behind us, Larry reflected on what he was fighting for, detailing his home not 20 miles away and the koi pond he had built for his wife. This fire was ravaging the place he loved, a place he did not want to abandon.

Slowly, the LNU Complex was finally contained, and Luchetti’s ranch was safe. We were lucky, but that is not always the case. Five years earlier, a fire sparked a few miles north of Luchetti’s ranch, exploding out of control. In one day, it destroyed much of the ranch, damaged three nearby towns and killed four people. The region had been vulnerable following the driest 4-year period in California’s recorded history. The first firefighters to respond almost died, and after the initial effort, almost no further attempts were made to contain the blaze. My family drove up the next morning, talked our way through police barricades, and brought badly needed supplies to the ranch. That day I saw cars melted to the road, puddles of aluminum where trailer homes used to be, and a crashed trailer of animals that did not make it. There were seemingly endless burned homes with a few residents left, looking stricken.

‘Fire season’ is a term that now describes half the year, though five years ago no one had heard the phrase. It is strange, but the 2015 fire felt separate from the current crisis. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience, a rare moment when a natural disaster broke into our lives. Since then, fire has become ingrained in our lives.

As I stood at the precipice of the 2020 fire season, images of scorched landscapes and smoking homes flashed in my head. Though my house would be spared that year, I know that it may burn soon. Fire will burn whether we like it or not, the question is: How?

A century of poor fire management on top of a changing climate has resulted in wildfires that are too large for the current model of firefighting to combat. It was hubris to believe we could suppress natural processes without consequence, and now we must accept fire as an integral part of the California landscape. Climate change has to be reversed, but that will not happen before next August, and prescribed burning is now our best hope for managing large-scale fires. As the Indigenous peoples proved for thousands of years, fire can be a part of our lives. The last few years proved that it will be. H

(Luchetti’s old barn, smouldering 12 hours after being burned, September 2015. Taken by Emily Luchetti.)