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These days the west coast of the United States is affected by huge fires, burning forests and towns for hundreds of kilometers, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and making the sky orange and the air unbreathable. Although according to many experts there have never been as serious as those of today, nevertheless, in that part of the United States the fires are not something new.
The main cause is the climate crisis, with a drought that has lasted for twenty years and the progressive increase in temperatures that led to a record 54.4 degrees in California in August, the highest temperature measured anywhere in the Land for at least a century, maybe longer: On the other hand, six of the twenty most devastating fires in modern California history developed in 2020. But the reasons that area of the United States burns every summer now they also refer to the unique and exemplary way in which that territory developed. We publish an excerpt from This is america, a book by Francesco Costa, also deputy director of the Post Office, which tells how the United States of America has become the country it is today, through eight exemplary stories of the great changes of the last twenty years.
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When the gold rush ended in the early 1900s, wood became the new gold in many rural California communities. Hectares and hectares of forests were deforested, especially in the north of the state, and the settlements that grew up around the plants to extract gold and later to treat wood were transformed into small villages. Thanks to especially permissive laws, which allowed building without major limitations and without a development plan for adequate infrastructures, around the seventies these communities, born in an improvised and spontaneous way, were transformed into true cities, built where they used to be. only trees.
One of them gave himself the name of Paradise, so wonderful was the place where he was. Twenty thousand inhabitants just over an hour from Sacramento, the capital of California: as if an entire neighborhood had been torn from the ground and thrown from above into the forest, with infinitely lower costs of living but no sewers, no protection systems against earthquakes or fires, sometimes even without sidewalks. And the surrounding forest was not the same as before, after years of logging. The trees that surrounded Paradise were no longer heterogeneous in type, age and size, the result of centuries of stratification and natural adjustments; they were trees replanted for decades by logging companies, all of the same species, all the same size, all equally fragile. A big box of matches, as the fires that licked the city from time to time noticed. Despite this threat, made even more urgent by climate change and drought, the county did not adapt Paradise’s infrastructure, expand its narrow evacuation routes, or organize systems that could possibly stem the flames – all that would have been. involved urban disturbances to which residents opposed.
The answer was limited to handling the problem once it happened. As in the rest of California – of which a quarter of the population already lived in rural and forested areas – fighting the increasingly frequent fires became a huge industrial complex: millions of dollars were spent hiring firefighters and shopping. helicopter, canadair and equipment of all kinds. Little or nothing was invested in prevention, in fact: the rangers became firefighters, even their uniform changed color from khaki to blue, and they stopped managing the forest, protecting the reservoirs, starting the controlled fires that periodically allow to eliminate vegetation understory and dead plants. The same massive presence of firefighters paradoxically became an incentive to move to Paradise, instead of leaving, especially since in the winter months, when fires were low and sporadic, the firefighters became fully a community service. . .
The last missing ingredient in the inevitable disaster, the spark, was literally brought in by Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), the energy company that serves the region, accused of inefficiency, corruption and negligence. The same one that for decades had placed pylons in the middle of the forest without cutting down the surrounding trees or replacing the dry ones. The same one against which in the nineties the activist Erin Brockovich became famous for the film with Julia Roberts. The same one that in 2010 in San Bruno, another city in Northern California, had seen an underground gas pipeline explode that had been damaged for years and never repaired, shooting a gigantic column of fire into the sky that had destroyed dozens of homes. The same company that, as it turned out, had long diverted funds earmarked for fire safety and prevention to pay executives as bonuses or shareholders as dividends. Things that not even villain movies, with cinematic consequences.
At dawn on November 8, 2018, a very strong wind was blowing. The air was dry and there had been no rain in the forest since May. In such places and situations, the most common firefighting practices, introduced in California after decades of devastating fires, invite companies to cut off electricity, at least until the wind dies down, but PG&E did not. Shortly after six o’clock in the morning an old pylon rocked by gusts of fifty miles per hour began to sway, until a large high tension cable broke and fell naked on the trees, which caught fire. The flames spread immediately and with great rapidity towards the only narrow path by which the means of firefighters could reach the area; Years earlier, in such a situation, a fire truck had gotten stuck, merging between two tongues of fire, while officers escaped on foot. […]
Within a couple of hours, the few narrow streets in and out of Paradise were already filled with cars and flames licked the city. When the last patient was evacuated from the small local hospital, the personnel office was already on fire. The cars in the queue advanced very slowly and increased every moment, while the first houses around them began to catch fire; in the most peripheral streets from time to time you could hear the explosion of a tire. Few tried to cross the traffic in the opposite direction, to save their children, the dog, the elderly parents. Meanwhile inside the carts the iron parts were heating up, the rubber of the steering wheels stuck to the hands, it seemed that even the air was burning.
Several people began to escape on foot, leaving the abandoned cars lined up to catch fire one after another, but meanwhile the streets became a wall of smoke and flames, and their shoes stuck to the asphalt. Firefighters arriving from out of town found a column of abandoned cars blocking the way. They called for bulldozers to move them, and in the meantime they managed with their trucks, which began to collide with the cars to push them from left to right into the flames, enough to clear a gap. Every now and then they would come across someone running away on foot or a fire hydrant that had no more water to spit out. The wind was still very strong.
It took two weeks and a long and intense storm to put out what, meanwhile, had become the most destructive and deadly fire in California history, and the most severe in all of the United States since 1918. “Camp Fire” , they call him. newspapers, named for the street where the trellis collapsed: Camp Creek Road. Eighty-five people died, one has never been found. More than 600 square kilometers of territory burned, about six times the total area of Florence, with damages of more than 15 billion dollars.
Today Paradise is a ghost town: the inhabitants have gone from twenty thousand to two thousand. The neighborhoods are an expanse of cremated ruins and chimneys – the only thing left standing in most of the houses – interspersed with deformed objects like in a surreal painting, whose previous function can only be imagined: that spot on the ground once it was a garbage can, that dripping mass was the top of a basket. Every day hundreds of trucks come and go carrying rubble and rubble. Some streets have been littered for months with remains of cars lined with keys still inserted and blackened or melted key rings.
What happened in Paradise is not an isolated case. Although not as strong as the Camp Fire, neglect of forests, drought, climate change, and ineffective prevention activities mean California is ravaged by wildfires every year from May through September. In 2015, 0.5 percent of the entire surface of the state burned. In 2016, 0.6 percent. In 2017, 1.3 percent. In 2018, the year of the “Camp Fire”, another 1.8 percent. The biggest fire of 2019, the ‘Walker Fire’, is seen in photographs of Earth taken from space.
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