A Fiery Wakeup Call

Pictured is the view from my yard that morning.

I understood September 8, 2020 to be nothing more than a somewhat cautious day of isolated life. Wildfires in the north of the state were heavily burning, causing increasingly poor air quality and an abnormal, dry grey haze to settle over the sky. I had assumed this would continue until mostly contained, and believed the next day to be one like any other. I’d go to class, I’d mill about inside.

 The morning of September 9, it looked as if the world had ended. My alarm went off to a completely dark bedroom hours past sunrise, and I woke up in a cold sweat. Where was I? It wasn’t quite completely dark out, but in my head, everything felt off. Was I dreaming? I turned my head ever so slightly to take a look outside, and the gravity of the situation hit me. The sky was, in fact, blood orange. I panicked. Did something happen? Had the world ended in my sleep, and by some chance, I survived only to see the aftermath? I check my phone, receiving a barrage of text messages, mostly in the vein of “did something happen, are we in Hell, are you safe, look out the window”. I stared outside in awe that the sky looked like that, as if it were a scene out of a grim science fiction film. I remained on edge for the rest of the day, as I stepped outside to take it all in, to check to see if this wasn’t a nightmare. Two events struck me when I left my childhood home, the haze setting in and making the trees look like silhouettes. The first was that the air, unlike the prior days, felt more breathable, yet still somewhat choking. As I further wandered outside, I found that my car, by no means spotless, had a thin layer of ash all over it. Indeed, the fires, once far away and vaguely threatening, were now tangible.

What I experienced that morning was merely a small part of a wider record-breaking series of wildfires in California. The specific fire which caused the red skies, the North Complex Fire, had begun in early August due to several dry thunderstorms and had been ravaging Northern California for some time. While the Bay Area was relatively safe, others were not so lucky. By the time I awoke to red skies over me, “20,000 people were under evacuation orders or warnings in the three counties” (AP), with miles of acreage destroyed. The specific red skies I witnessed were due to the nature of the electromagnetic spectrum and smoke particulate. When there is less material in the air, “incoming solar radiation hits small objects such as nitrogen and oxygen molecules and bounces off in all directions. The short wavelengths of blue light are scattered more efficiently by small objects than those of other colors” (Kusumaningtyas et al), which constitutes the blue sky we’re used to. However, smoke particulates are much larger than the molecules which make up the atmosphere, which absorb the smaller wavelengths of blue light, in a process called Mie scattering. This, in turn, caused the orange skies I witnessed on that strange, alien morning. While I was lucky enough to avoid any major damage, the experience haunted me for some time. The question, of course, remains if California will be hit by another severe series of wildfires any time soon.

Works Cited:

Duginski, Paul. “How Smoke from California Wildfires Turns the Sky Red.” The Los Angeles Times, 15 Sept. 2020, https://archive.ph/Gbh8F#selection-1341.1-1354.3. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023. 

Kusumaningtyas, S D, et al. “Why was the Sky Red in Jambi during the forest fire?” IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, vol. 893, no. 1, 2021, p. 012052, https://doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/893/1/012052. 

“Crews Search for Missing as California Fires Put Thousands under Orders to Evacuate.” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 10 Sept. 2020, www.cbsnews.com/news/california-fires-missing-people-search-thousands-evacuate/.