Not Your Average Camp Fire

Flames from the 2018 Camp Fire near Big Bend, CA Image: ABC7 News

Despite what movies like San Andreas might depict, earthquakes haven't been a serious concern for my family in the 18 years I've lived in San Francisco. Instead, my experience with geohazards comes from wildfires that annually devastate California. This past September, as my parents sent me pictures of the apocalyptic orange skies from home, I thought back to this time two years ago, when the Camp Fire tore through Northern California. 

On November 8, 2018 at 6:30 am, a fire started in a wooded area of California’s Butte County. It was later determined that a 100-year old power line owned by Pacific Gas and Engineering (PG&E) sparked the first flame. By 8:30am, 132 calls were made to 911 dispatchers in Chico County from distressed residents of a town called Paradise. By noon that day, the Camp Fire tore through the entire town, covering more than 60 football fields a minute. The fire’s rapid spread was due to a variety of factors, including that year’s drought and the dry northeasterly Diablo winds. The fire continued to burn everything in its path, damaging 153,553 acres of land and taking 85 lives. 

The Ridgewood Mobile Home Park in Paradise, CA after the Camp Fire Image: ABC7 News

Fortunately, the flames did not make the 170 mile journey south to San Francisco, however, the Bay Area felt the effects of the Camp Fire for about two weeks after it started, as the whole city was covered in a blanket of smoke and fine particulate matter, which led to our air quality to reach as high as 274, one of the highest AQIs in the world at the time. I remember one day waking up to the smell of smoke, and the sky looked hazy and put a yellowish orange filter on everything. When my dad and I left for school that morning, little white flakes of ash covered the sidewalk and roof of our car. It was hard to believe that the ash and smoke were coming from so far away, and even harder to imagine what it must have been like to live in the Camp Fire’s direct path. When I left school that day, my teachers handed out N95 masks, and told us it was unsafe to breathe without one on. That night, our principal sent an email cancelling classes for the next two days because the smoke and air quality were only going to get worse. I remember all of my friends texting me out of disbelief after the announcement came out and I explained to my East Coast relatives that we got a fire day instead of snow days in San Francisco. For a couple of days, you could feel the smoke burn your nostrils and tingle your throat when you breathed, which was super scary, and most people spent that week indoors. 

Air quality levels in California cities following the Camp Fire Image: California Healthline

The hazardous air quality and eerie city glow that my family and I experienced after the Camp Fire is incomparable to the much more serious and permanent damages done to areas closer to the fire. The 2018 Camp Fire resulted in $8.4 billion in insured losses, making it the most expensive natural disaster in the world that year. In Paradise, the town hit first and the hardest by the flames, only 11 of the thousands of structures destroyed were rebuilt a year after the Camp Fire. Furthermore, the Camp Fire of 2018 was only the beginning of what seems to be a worsening fire season in California. As noted in fellow Californians Keira and Matt’s blogs, the 2020 wildfires surpassed the 2018 fires as the most expensive and damaging. With the fires only getting worse and leaving towns and families little time to recover, it is of great importance for California to think about how to mitigate these damages and prevent fires from even starting. 

References:

“Camp Fire: By the Numbers.” FRONTLINE. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/camp-fire-bythe-numbers/ (November 24, 2020).

“Camp Fire Caused Nearly 2 Straight Weeks of Bay Area’s Worst Air Quality on Record.” KQED. https://www.kqed.org/news/11712211/the-camp-fire-caused-nearly-two-straight-weeks-of-the-bayareas-worst-air-quality-on-record (November 24, 2020).

Irfan, Umair. 2018. “Why the Wildfire in Northern California Was so Severe.” Vox. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/11/13/18092580/paradise-californiawildfire-2018 (November 24, 2020).