Not to be #thatperson but I feel like national news isn’t fully realizing how bad this is. Not to detract from the horror of Paradise and surrounding towns but this is really bad. And Sacramento is worse.
It is that bad, and you are not supposed to mind. You are supposed to accept the new normal. Sometimes American cities will be uninhabitable. Sometimes America will just burn. You will be encouraged to identify with this. It’ll probably be a whole thing, like how New Englanders take pride in driving in snowstorms.
The city of San Francisco currently has the worst air quality of anywhere in the world because of the wildfires. (This level of air quality, incidentally, is bad for people and kills them.) These once-in-a-lifetime wildfires will become more common in our lifetimes.
I think ! it’s okay! to say this isn’t fine!!
THIS IS NOT FINE
TEN YEARS AGO THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN TOP OF NEWS CYCLE DISASTER COVERAGE
THIS IS REALLY REALLY BAD AND WE SHOULD NOT LOOK AWAY
A few more things to think about:
a) This is happening in a region where the majority of the population does not have air conditioning in their homes, because the climate in the coastal parts of the Bay Area (including the East Bay, where we live) is typically very mild, and rarely gets warm enough to require cooling. Right now, it’s also not warm enough to require A/C for cooling, but A/C can also be used to filter indoor air. So most Bay Area residents do not have any technological means to filter the air inside their homes. When hbbo and I left earlier this week, the air inside was vastly better than the air outside, but the smoke was still so bad indoors that we were wearing N95 masks inside our apartment. Telling people to stay inside is a pretty inadequate way of protecting them when the air inside is so bad you taste ash every time you pull your mask down to take a sip of water.
c) N95 masks, the only protective mechanism most Bay Area residents have access to, frequently don’t fit children correctly, because their faces are too small to allow for a good seal, and a lot of public health outlets are just flat-out recommending against having children wear them. Just—think about that, for a second. The entire Bay Area and Central Valley are in the middle of a public health crisis that has, now, for large swathes of that area, lasted for over a week. There are very few places in that entire area, indoors or out, where you can go to get a full breath of clean air. So, throughout that area, most kids are just—breathing in smoke. All day. Every day. Indoors and out.
d) I grew up in Los Angeles and I’ve lived in California for most of my life (I’m 37), and yes, wildfires have always been a part of the California experience. But not in November. It used to be that California had a well-defined “fire season” that lasted from about May to about October, with the worst of the fire risk in the most heavily populated parts of the state coming between mid-August and mid-October, which is, for wide swathes of California, the hottest part of the year (I know this sounds bananas to non-Californians, but this is just what our climate’s like: our perceptual summer is dramatically late-shifted into the autumn, and our technical “summers” can actually be quite cool, especially if you’re near the coast, as is true in SF and LA).
e) You can use Breezometer to compare the air quality in the Bay Area to the air quality in your location. The air quality at our apartment is currently 18/100 on their scale (higher is better); it’s dipped as low as 12 at various points this week. As I’m writing this on Saturday morning, the air quality is noticeably improving for most of the state, but:
…last night, and for several days previous, that blob of red centered around Chico was contiguous all the way west to the coast, down the coast past Monterey, and all the way south (through that area that’s currently orange/yellow) down the middle of the state—the Central Valley—to Visalia, and orange down to Bakersfield. Because I think California scale is hard to grasp sometimes: it’s about a three hour drive in no traffic just from San Jose to the area that hbbo and I are staying, near San Luis Obispo (marked on the map as “San Luis” because the “Obispo” got cut off—green area on the western coast, near the bottom of this screencap). The actual fire, which is near Chico, is about 370 miles (595 km), or a five and a half hour drive, from the southern edge of its smoke cloud in Bakersfield.
