Essential California

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Friday, July 12, and I’m writing from Los Angeles. For most Californians, the 2018 Camp fire was a deeply horrific but discrete event. In downstate California, we are all too aware that 85 people lost their lives in the deadliest fire in state history, and that the recovery continues. But we also largely conceive of the devastation in the past tense. It happened, it was terrible, and now it is done. It’s a very different story up in Butte, a county 90 miles north of the state Capitol, bordered by the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the east and the Sacramento River to the west. Butte County is home to fire-decimated Paradise and neighboring Chico, where an influx of more than 15,000 Camp fire survivors has created a “new normal,” with the college town deeply strained by a 20% increase in its population nearly overnight. Butte County residents also live with a tragedy whose reaches have yet to unfold — the long-term health effects of the wildfire smoke. That toxic smoke cloaked much of Northern California for weeks, but in Chico it was a “hellscape.” The small staff of the Chico Enterprise-Record (which was a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist for breaking news reporting) has valiantly and extensively covered the fire and its aftermath, even as they and their loved ones were personally affected. Along with her full-time job covering daily stories, Chico Enterprise-Record reporter Robin Epley has spent much of the past year examining the health effects of wildfire smoke for a five-part series and podcast called “Inhaled.” (Installments one and two have already been released, and the next one comes out on Sunday.)

Robin Epley covering the Camp Fire in November 2018. (Photo courtesy of Robin Epley)

I spoke with Epley about her coverage and how changing development patterns will affect future fires. Here’s some of what she told me, lightly edited and condensed for clarity. Much of your series focuses on the breadth of what we don’t yet know about the potential long-term effects of this smoke. What are the biggest things that we don’t know here? We don’t know how fires in the wildland-urban interface are going to affect large swaths of population. We don’t know what was in the air that day in Paradise and Chico because of equipment failure. We don’t know how many people were affected because the nature of smoke is ephemeral. And we are never going to know how many people are experiencing morbidity and mortality because of this fire. That’s something that’s just not quantifiable. Can you tell us about the wildland-urban interface, and why it matters? That’s something I talk about in the first episode, because it was something that kept coming up amongst all the researchers and scientists I was speaking with. It’s sort of a designation that has been given to urban sprawl — you can think of it that way — into rural areas. So, if you’ve never been to Paradise before the fire, you can really think of it as sort of the stereotypical mountain town. There’s trees everywhere. There’s bushes everywhere. The houses are not stacked on top of each other like they are in subdivisions, there are these wide spaces between them. But that is exactly the type of housing that is in the wildland-urban interface. You can hear it in the name: It’s wildland and it’s urban. What happens in the wildland-urban interface during a fire? There is more and more of that type of urban development into what used to be just wildland, where if it burned, it burned. [But if] you suddenly have housing in the middle of that, or an elementary school or a gas station, or all of the above, well, [a wildfire] suddenly becomes a big deal. Because not only are those people displaced, and then there’s huge trauma and a giant social event, but you also get that smoke. And that’s exactly what the point of this podcast is. How do we look at these new types of wildfires? And what are we doing to mitigate the health effects? Because, again, we just don’t know. We haven’t had enough time with these types of events to be able to study them.