California in Flames
Fire is a word Californians are all too familiar with these days.
Every year people anticipate fire season, however more and more fires are happening outside the seasonal norm. Human activity as well as climate change have caused this irregularity.
“We used to think there was a fire season,” CSUN Geography & Environmental Studies Professor Amalie Orme said. “In our traditional way of thinking, probably from mid-20th century into the early years of this century, we always thought it was going to be sometime in the fall and maybe into early winter, but I think in the last two decades now, we’ve seen a very different type of pattern, where we can see fire year round.”
Data show that these fires are becoming larger as well. The most recent highly destructive fire in Southern California was the Thomas fire. It burned for more than a month, leaving thousands of acres burned and destroying nearly 800 homes.
In efforts to control fires, campaigns like Smokey Bear have been used. This wildfire prevention campaign educates the community on what it can do to prevent these fires with fuel management practices. Unfortunately, these efforts do not always work when Mother Nature gets involved.
“All these fires are driven by these natural things,” retired LAFD fire-fighter and FlameMapper.com co-founder Anthony Shafer said. “The real thing, that I personally think adds to it, is the buildup over the years of fuels, and the tons per acre of dry fuels on the landscape, and the fact that we haven’t figured out how to get rid of that, or decrease that.”
“You have this other dynamic in here,’ Orme said, “when you have this big fuel-loading, especially in areas that are difficult to access, because when you start to look at the way fires are patterned over time…we wind up with these mosaics of vegetation, which may not have the adaptive capacity to regenerate and prevent the understory from basically refueling itself.”
Climate change is another driving force behind these California flames. Temperatures are rising, causing landscapes to be drier for longer periods of time. The current California drought does not help the situation either, and experts say heavy rainfall may not even be enough to counteract the rising temperatures. These conditions leave certain areas more susceptible to catch and sustain fire.
These susceptibilities can change someone’s life overnight.
“When I was about 8-years-old, my family lost their home to the 1993 Topanga fire,” FlameMapper.com co-founder Shea Broussard said. “I didn’t really understand how to process the feelings of emotion at the time. It was very strange and very odd. When you lose your house, you don’t realize you lose that sense of place, that sense of home… You’ve had the worst day that could ever happen to you, and you don’t have a place to go home to.”
Broussard said no one can really prepare for the devastation of a fire. Fires occur unexpectedly, and many people do not know what to do after they’re over, or how they can protect their homes against the scorching flames.
“[People] don’t have their to-go bags,” Shafer said. “They don’t have all their financial information; they don’t have all their insurance documentation…That’s where the devastation is, the fact that they get to [shelters], and they’re sitting there on this bench, and they realize the only thing they’ve got in the world is what they are sitting there with.”
No two fires are the same, but they have similar and lasting effects.
“A fire can really change a community,” Broussard said. “It takes years to try to recover, and it’s a bigger event than people can actually wrap their brain around.”
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