In 2018, California had the most destructive wildfire in California history, The Campfire. Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior, said "Every time I come to California I say this is the worst fire I’ve seen. Once again this is the absolute worst. Worse than any war zone I saw in Iraq". It was the first time I had experienced the effects of wildfires and it was horrible. I woke up before any of my family to bike to school; I thought that it was just a really foggy morning and was confused on what the layer of black stuff on everything was. It wasn’t until I got to school and talked to my classmates that I found out about the wildfire. The black stuff was ash from the homes and forests destroyed. There was so much of it too. When I came home I found out that my brother’s school in Santa Rosa had burned to the ground. The school was the only special needs school that my brother could go to that was within our distance. I wondered if the ash in my backyard was once his school or if some of the ash might be people who couldn’t get out in time.
I live in a small town about 10 minutes away from San Francisco called Corte Madera. I’m used to wildfires and droughts. I remember in elementary school during recess my friends and I would sit in a circle holding hands begging for it to rain. It didn’t seem to help though. The drought didn’t get better till 2017, when we had long stopped even hoping for rain.
Our fire season in 2019 set a new record of more than 2.5-million acres burned. The Kincade fire happened in Sonoma County on October 26 until November 6 and it burned 77,758 acres. The fire happened due to a malfunction in PG&E equipment. PG&E then shut off power for an estimated 3 million people to try to prevent more fires from happening. The power outage lasted for about a week, but it was different for everyone depending on your location. During this week we couldn’t use any technology because we didn’t have anything to charge them. All the stores were closed and phones were now only used for emergencies to save battery life. Everyone was scared and the loss of power made the fear worse. Many people were scared for their friends and family that lived where the fire was happening, but everyone was scared that the fire would reach where they were. Jenny Lowry, a Concow resident, said on Capradio about the fire, “People are barely functioning. They’re smelling smoke from these other fires. Nobody’s sleeping. It's terrifying to live up there right now because the what-if factor. Every little thing. 'Should I pack, should I go? Oh, should I have my stuff in the car?' ”.
On September 9th, 2020, everyone in the San Francisco Bay Area woke up to a bright orange smokey sky. The orange sky was from over twenty wildfires that burned more than 2 million acres East of the San Francisco Bay Area. The smoke clouded everything so it was hard to see without the sun. Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist, wrote that the smoke was “almost completely blocking out the sun across portions of Northern California.” It hurt to see the orange sky for the first time and going outside was unbearable with the smoke. I thought of the people that couldn’t leave the fire in time, the animals who couldn’t make it out, everyone who lost their home, and for everyone who had to breathe this air in. It felt like we didn’t have a future anymore. I hadn’t been able to leave the house for months due to quarantine and now I couldn’t even sit outside. Climate change has already doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015 in the western United States
Thankfully the fires never came too close to my house, but I still felt their impact. I’ve had to adapt by running and biking in an N95 mask when the smoke wasn’t severe enough to cancel school. I worry about all the smoke I’ve had to inhale over the years trying to do basic tasks outside. Despite being extremely grateful that I wasn’t directly affected by the fires, I fear eventually I will be. With the temperature rising it will create warmer and drier conditions causing wildfires to become more prevalent than they already are.
We cannot afford to hide our heads in the sand anymore. We have to take action to protect our environment otherwise our children may not be able to grow up in the same world we grew up in. But there is still hope thankfully due to the scientists that work everyday to find new solutions and the activists that never stayed silent no matter how much people told them to. We still have a chance to stop it before it gets even worse.
