Mud [Fire], Mire, and Misery
Disaster always comes as a surprise, a new study obligates our expectation of it
(No. 37, a ±09 minute read)
Will we in the U.S. ever gain an ability to learn from our past?
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Last week in New Mexico wildfires burned on Mescalero Apache land and in nearby Ruidoso, two deaths have been attributed and over 25,000 acres burned. The fire in the Ruidoso area is being called arson and an FBI reward posted. This is an area I know from my time living in New Mexico, a place I’ve hiked and hunted for fossils. Pictures in the press were painful to see — and all too familiar.
In fact, they were effectively the same images I’d made five years ago and hoped might never need be made again, and then saw and refused to make in Lāhainā.
It is often hard to conceptualize events that haven’t happened, but this is exactly the job of disaster planners. On New Year’s Eve, 1987, parts of suburban Honolulu flooded in ways that had not been previously considered as possible and as such had not been conceptualized. These floods occurred after O‘ahu’s post-war building boom had been (mostly) completed and we here saw this twenty years’ development as outside of nature’s influence — permanent. In the mop-up assessment done by the National Academies to aid future disaster planning the authors wrote:
When the torrential rainfall finally subsided the next morning, the residents of Oahu were confronted with more than $34 million in flood damage. The major disaster areas were in the valleys of Niu, Kuliouou, and Hahaione, in the southeastern part of Oahu, and the Waimanalo area and Coconut Grove (Kailua) on the windward side of the Koolau Mountains (Figure 1). Although the total amount of damage may not be considered severe by continental U.S. standards and no lives were lost, the alarming aspect of the event was that the flood occurred without warning and affected densely populated urban watershed areas.1
I was caught at the most intense of the flooding on Kahena St. in Hahaione Valley. It was like nothing I could have imagined at my green age — one of the biggest drainage ditches we skated regularly, Pipeline Bowls, was filled to overflowing with boulders and debris, water entirely overflowed my parents’ Nissan 710 before I got it up a friend’s driveway. Street, cars, and homes were wrecked as if by giants. The New Year’s Flood, as it came to be called, was a moment of revelation for O‘ahu — this could happen, something totally unforeseen. Something unimaginable.
Our natural world has a way of delivering us “unimaginable” events. This occurrence is inherent in our relationship to it; in our conception of the relationship anyway — as not a part of that natural world. When I walked the fireground in Paradise I was certain that the blaze would expand our understanding of the possibilities that global warming had in store for us, that it would be a bellwether, providing us the painful gift of imaginings to come.
We understand now that it wasn’t any of that. But I think that it’s worthwhile to revisit a few of the photos I made there — with their captions — in order to even begin to grasp the detailed reality of what we face in these sorts of new, global warming-era wildfires. Perhaps grasping the detailed particulars of what happens during and after a fire breaches the WUI can be clarifying in a way that a photo of yet another burned structure or car isn’t in a news context.
A study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution indicates that in the twenty-one years from 2003 until 2023 so-called “extreme” wildfire occurrences have more than doubled and this doubling tracks neatly with those of the earth’s regions seeing the greatest heating. Extreme fire include the Camp Fire, Lāhainā, the Canadian mega-fires of last summer, or the bush fires that burned in Australia in 2019 (and many, many others).
According to the study, which originated at the University of Tasmania, this increasing trend is also accelerating relative to the intensity of extreme wildfires, which had also doubled during the twenty-one year study period. Last year represented the year with the most intense wildfires in the study period.
Here is a glimpse of what that looks like, from Paradise, California. Take a look at our past to imagine our future. Understand that every similar fire looks essentially like this. These images and consequences are interchangeable. If the study’s correlation of frequency and intensity tracking so well with the parts of the earth heating and drying fastest doesn’t cause our societies to get serious about facing global warming, I am not sure what might.
Paradise in the Aftermath of the Camp Fire2
Pickup, Ponderosa Pine, and Fireplace with Standing Chimney
Crown fires, wildfires which burn through and travel within the crowns of trees, are spectacular, devastating fires which leave felled and charred trees in their paths. These are the forest fires typically in the public imagination thanks in part to the success of the Smoky the Bear public service announcement campaigns since the 1960s. Fires like the Camp Fire are a mix of structure fires, forest fires, and brush wildfires, each demanding its own specific suppression techniques.
Urban firefighters are specifically trained to attack fires in buildings while wildfire fire crews are trained to stop fires in wildlands with techniques that are not at all similar to fighting structure fires. Typically one sort of firefighter is not possessed of the skills or equipment of the other. The increasing incidence of fires burning through the wildland urban interface makes the managing of multiple types of fires and their specific personnel a difficult job which few are certified to command. These complicated fires are called Type I incidents.
In the case of terrifyingly fast-moving Type I fire incidents like the Camp and Tubbs fires there is often little that officials are able to do to stop or slow the fire’s advance and concentration on evacuations becomes a critical priority for authorities managing a response. Making these decisions necessarily means allowing structures to burn completely, evincing the sort of destruction rarely seen outside of wartime.
Steel Pallet Shelving, Foreman’s Desk and Yard Statuary; Residential Garage
Steel, for the most part, maintains 100% of its design capacities for strength and resilience to deformation up to temperatures of about 600ºF. Steel loses half of its design strength at 1000ºF and loses 100% of its design capacities at 2,200ºF — about 500ºF below its outright melting point. Incinerating structure fires like that which destroyed Paradise burn at temperatures hot enough to entirely consume wood framing, interior furnishings, and nearly everything a building might contain, leaving behind few artifacts of the lives lived in these destroyed buildings, except those made from steel and porcelain.
Another of very few surviving household artifacts remaining after fires that burn as hot as the Camp Fire are the cremains families often preserve at home. A specialized team of archaeologists from ALTA Archaeological Consulting used dogs trained to discover human remains to recover the cremains of loved ones in the destroyed homes of survivors of the Camp Fire. As of mid-January the team had recovered 53 sets of cremains left behind by people fleeing the fire. They work for free with the goal of using their specialized skills to reunite families upended by fire and prevent their cremated family and friends from being carted off in the fire’s remediation, to be forever interred with toxic waste from a fire.
Immolated Parked Passenger Car
Evacuation from the path of the Camp Fire was impossible for many who died — lack of car ownership, age, disabilities, failed garage doors due to power outages, and the fire’s incredible time scale all contributed. In the aftermath of the fire, the evacuation and its plan became a fraught topic with only 30% of Paradise area residents signed up for the local emergency alert system and failures of the system itself due to communications equipment collapse. Additionally, Paradise’s evacuation plan was codified as a staggered plan, designed to get people out over hours, not the mere minutes the Camp Fire allowed.
The fire’s ignition was at 6:31 a.m. in the Feather River Canyon near the Jarbo Gap, a notch in the wall of the Sierra Nevada. Early that morning the weather station at the gap saw 52mph winds and generated a forecast with a 76% chance of fire demanding crewed extinguishment. The katabatic Santa Ana winds (winds that drain high pressure air at higher elevation areas into lower elevation, low pressure areas) blowing from the Great Basin to the Pacific coast regularly achieve 100mph through the Jarbo and have occasionally reached speeds of 200mph. Once the Camp Fire began in low-humidity, dense fuel conditions this local wind quickly intensified the blaze.
As a fast-moving megafire it began to create its own winds of near 90mph, flinging firebrands downwind. Within an hour of the first evacuation order at 7:46 a.m. gridlock trapped hundreds in Paradise; eight miles from the fire’s origin only 90 minutes earlier. It entered Paradise at 7:59 a.m. and soon the blaze was hot enough to melt the tires and burst windows of evacuees’ cars. There were at least nineteen burnovers in town, instances where all evacuation routes were blocked by fire. Burnovers had previously been considered to be rare wildfire occurrences. By 9:15 a.m. Paradise was destroyed. At its early afternoon peak the fire grew 10,000 acres in a single 90 minute period; a football field-sized rate of growth every second. Many evacuees truly had no chance. In Concow six died in or near their cars fleeing flames. The official Paradise toll saw eight evacuees die in their cars, and one next to their car.
Village Square Condominiums
Village Square was a forty unit, two story condominium complex. The entire complex was reduced to ash, displacing a fraction of the approximately 50,000 people displaced by the fire. The Camp Fire’s humanitarian and housing crisis is severe; it caused the effective destruction of the towns of Paradise and Magalia as well as the unincorporated community of Concow. The fire did substantial damage to the communities of Centerville, Butte Creek Canyon, and Yankee Hill and by its impacts to each of these locales it created a domestic refugee crisis.
California is already facing a substantial housing shortage and the loss of so many affordable units (at least by California standards) in the burn area hits hard. Previous to the fire Butte County’s rental vacancy rate was about 3%, today it is near zero. The burned area was home to a substantial number of elderly and impoverished, many of whom are facing difficult choices and potential homelessness after surviving the fire. It is estimated that the fire destroyed 14% of the county’s housing stock, the loss of which is inflating housing costs in the area and prejudicing landlords against evacuees holding federal Section 8 vouchers in place of renters able to pay more; credible reports of rental price-gouging are common.
Mama Celeste’s Pizzeria, 5522 Skyway Road
One of many restaurants destroyed in the Camp Fire was the popular Mama Celeste’s Pizzeria. The enormous number of structures burned by the Camp Fire presents a unique problem with regards to the disposal and recycling of the resulting debris. With a goal of recycling at least a fifth of the debris, the cleanup effort will require thousands of round trips of over one hundred miles made by heavy trucks to transfer facilities that will send metals and concrete by rail to sites in Nevada and Utah for recycling. [Much recycling was ultimately done in-state.]
Contaminated ash and soils will be wrapped and trucked to area landfills, also requiring round trips of more than one hundred miles. This heavy traffic will prematurely wear roads requiring repaving and exceeding CalTrans and local repaving schedules. There is concern that as massively destructive wildfires increasingly burn into developed areas, as has also happened recently in Santa Rosa and Redding, local landfill space will quickly be filled up, overtaxing waste stream management plans. It is estimated that the nearest landfill to the Camp Fire burn area, Anderson Landfill, has about sixty years’ capacity remaining. A Waste Management executive estimates that Camp Fire debris alone will use five years’ capacity.
Adding a Name, Camp Fire Memorial
Eighty-six people were killed in the Camp Fire, principally in Paradise and Magalia, and one person remains missing.3 At least fifty additional deaths have been linked to the fire by coroners and public health workers, but not attributed to its official death toll. The fire has been the deadliest in California’s history. A death toll of this scale hits small, tightly knit communities particularly hard — the human toll in a fire of this magnitude is impossible to calculate: the deaths of friends, family, partners, and spouses; displacement of tens of thousands; individual mental health and economic stability threatened; the list goes on.
The terror of the fire’s missing persons list was visceral throughout the state, at one point achieving a peak of more than 600 people. Diligent and exhaustive work by personally-affected local authorities whittled the list down. The fire burned so hot that forensic anthropology students from nearby Chico State, and working forensic anthropologists from out-of-state, were called in to aid the search, sifting sites for remains. Archaeologists used dogs trained to identify human bone fragments to search for victims. Even with these extraordinary efforts there are people among the dead whose bodies will never be identified or even recovered. Such thorough and wide-ranging devastation had been previously incomprehensible in day-to-day, local American experience.
Survive, Resilience, Hope, Rise
People’s grief is widespread and broadly focused in Butte County. Therapist Matt Reddam, MS, MFT, works as a consultant to the Butte County Office of Education and said regarding the fire’s survivors, “None of us are OK, let’s get that shit straight. There is no template for losing three communities in three hours.” Speaking in the context of the domestic American experience he is correct; such devastation has typically been the consequence of war on foreign soil.
Reddam has spent time with the more than 200 volunteer mental health professionals from all over California working to address the psychological needs of the areas’ crisis-stricken students and school staff. They are all working under Butte County’s Coordinator of Trauma Response and Recovery, a newly created position. Scott Lindstrom, the new coordinator, is bringing twenty new counselors into the school system on six-month contracts as he works to define long-term plans to address trauma and loss in the school system.
In a county with poverty rates among the highest in the state it is an open question as to whether or not such services will be available to all who need them. With so many dead, displaced, and otherwise affected there is simply no precedent for this scale of mental health recovery effort in California’s recent history.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 1991. The New Year's Eve Flood on Oahu, Hawaii: December 31, 1987 - January 1, 1988. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/1748. The italics are mine.
From a series of nineteen images and associated text published in 2019 attempting to account for the specific issues that faced Paradise, Butte County, and California in the immediate aftermath of 2018’s Camp Fire. At the time it was the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in a century, that awful title was transferred in 2023 to Maui’s shores. The consequences of the two fires are similar but complicated on Maui by Indigeneity and legacies of agricultural colonialism.
Note: the death toll was revised to eighty-five, Sara Martinez-Fabila remains unaccounted for in the fire’s aftermath.