Smoke and Wildfire
IT’S OFFICIAL. On July 23, Ashland had the worst air in the country. Smoke from at least one hundred forest fires blanketed southern Oregon, the product of more than 2,000 lightning strikes from a rash of thunderstorms the week before. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) in Ashland’s air had reached the “hazardous” level. Local officials advised residents to limit outdoor activity and, if they must go out, to wear specialized “particulate respirator” masks.
In the days since, the air quality has swung between “unhealthy” and “hazardous.” The daily temperature has pushed 100 degrees. Precipitation for the year is half of normal (around 20 inches annually).
Fire season has come early to southern Oregon—indeed, to the West—on the heels of a brutal wildfire season last summer.
In New England, my experiences with “adverse” weather events had been limited to blizzards and a few hurricanes. When a storm took down tree limbs, we lost power, occasionally for several days. With wet snows, digging out the driveway and car could take several hours. In Brooklyn, the business of negotiating intersections with high piles of snow and seas of slush sometimes kept Tony and me inside, boots off.
Being on the front lines of climate change here in Southern Oregon is a different story.
We had fallen in love with Ashland last August, as I’ve mentioned before, when the smoke and smell of wildfire hung thick and the heat soared. But that was the end of the summer. This year, the fires appeared early, with the unspoken assumption that the smoke and heat will last until September.
Our house is part of a 74-member Home Owner’s Association, and a few weeks before we arrived at the end of March, we received an invitation from the HOA’s president for a “Map Your Neighborhood” meeting. Neighbors would make plans for mutual assistance in case of disaster, when professional emergency responders may be overwhelmed and unable to come to our aid. We would share special skills and needs, creating our own support network.
Several days after we arrived, a smart-looking 13-page “Emergency Preparedness Guidebook” arrived in the mail from Ashland Fire and Rescue, designed to fit into a magnetized plastic pouch for the refrigerator door. Earthquakes and floods got passing attention, but wildfires were the star.
“Ashland residents are highly encouraged to create defensible space to reduce the risk of wildfire around their homes and neighborhoods,” the guidebook advised. The “before the fire” checklist included maintaining a three to five-foot buffer around the house’s foundation with no combustible plants or materials, no bark mulch, “limbing up” trees within 30 feet of the house, keeping dry grass and weeds mowed to four inches or less throughout the fire season, and much more.
We learned about “controlled burns.”
“After a century of putting wildfires out, our forests are overly dense and need restoration through selective thinning and prescribed fire, or controlled burns,” the Ashland Forest Resiliency project explained. Good fire, we now know, prevents bad fire. The project, a unique ten-year effort between the town and the US Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy, deploys professional fire teams to plan controlled burns during favorable weather, before the fire season heats up. Daily alerts let the public know where to expect a plume of smoke and when. Untutored in controlled burns, the first time I saw distant smoke coming from the mountainous and forested public lands behind our house, all I could think was: “Don’t tell me our house is going up in smoke only two weeks after we moved in!”
Some of the other things I’ve learned:
The “particulate respirators” recommended for those sensitive to smoke must fit snugly to an individual’s face to actually work; they come in only one size, albeit adjustable. “It is impossible to get a good seal on individuals with facial hair,” a bulletin on the Jackson County Health & Human Services website reads.
Unless one has heavy-duty air filters, the air quality indoors is pretty much the same as outdoors. When I insisted to my husband, Tony, that can’t be true, he pulled out his professional quality air monitor and quickly demonstrated how the readings for fine particulate matter were virtually identical, inside our house and out.
About 60 percent of all forest lands in Oregon are owned by the federal government. Private owners hold 35 percent. Forest landowners pay a yearly assessment tied to their holdings, but the federal government pays the majority of the tab for fighting wildfires. A private insurance policy helps cover firefighting expenses when all other funding sources have been expended.
In Oregon, private contractors contribute to the wildfire fighting force. Sometimes farmers join the battle. Here as in other states, the force also includes trained prison inmates (350 in 2017) either on the front lines or in the fire camps set up to house and feed the fighters.
The toll on tourism in Ashland has been immediate. Yesterday afternoon (a Sunday), the outdoor restaurants along Ashland Creek, next to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, were deserted when three weeks ago they were packed.
Newspapers everywhere are telling the same story. “This is a hot, strange and dangerous summer across the planet,” The Washington Post says.
“Greece is in mourning after scorching heat and high winds fueled wildfires that have killed more than 80 people. Japan recorded its highest temperature in history, 106 degrees….Ouargla, Algeria, hit 124 degrees on July 5, a likely record for the continent of Africa…. Montreal hit 98 degrees on July 2, its warmest temperature ever measured…. In the United States, 35 weather stations in the past month have set new marks for warm overnight temperatures.”
The brutal weather has been supercharged by human-induced climate change, scientists say. Climate models for three decades have predicted exactly what the world is seeing this summer.
And they predict that it will get hotter and, in places across the globe like Oregon, drier—and that what is a record today could someday be the norm.
The unprecedented growth in wildfires is part of this narrative.
“The old records belong to a world that no longer exists,” said Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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