Notes from the dystopia

My wife and I left Santa Rosa Thursday afternoon for a long-planned long weekend away at Lake Tahoe. We left even though I’d been awake since around 2 am Thursday tracking the Kincade fire, about twenty five miles north of us, on Twitter and anywhere else I thought I might get an update. We had a “wind event” Wednesday night and in anticipation, Pacific Gas & Electric had shut down power to tens of thousands of Sonoma County residents, hoping to avoid having the wind bring one of their power lines down and burning up another California city. For some reason, though, they did leave power running through some high tension lines up near The Geysers geothermal plant above Geyserville and one of these, it seems, came down and sparked this fire. By daybreak on Thursday the fire was 10,000 acres with zero containment. Oops.

So with that, we thought of staying home, but with another, more severe wind event due this today and the prospect of having the power shut off this afternoon and continuing through the weekend and smoke filled skies at home, we decided to go on our trip. And we’re glad we did, because it’s beautiful up here, one of the prettiest places in the country, with spectacular weather and clear blue skies. But we’ve been hiking and driving around the lake and enjoying our meals with an eye on what’s going on back home, getting updates by text message and phone calls and twitter. Sonoma State University, thirty five miles from the fire in Rohnert Park, shut down on Friday and will remain closed, except for those students who won’t leave and a skeleton staff to feed them, at least through Monday. The cities of Healdsburg and Windsor (aka, the heart of the wine country) have been ordered evacuated (yes, completely evacuated) by 4 pm on Saturday. This is in addition to Geyserville, evacuated on Thursday, and more than a dozen other communities between the current fire zone and the Pacific Ocean that lie in the evacuation warning zone, as well as much of northern Santa Rosa. I was told early this afternoon that US 101, the only freeway in and out of the wine country, was already bumper to bumper heading south to Santa Rosa by 1:00 this afternoon. Most of Santa Rosa and the rest of Sonoma County will be without power by nightfall after PG&E cuts it off.

The conditions tonight are more dire than when the Tubbs and associated fires started in October two years ago. The winds tonight are expected to exceed those in 2017 by about 20 mph, we’re a couple weeks later into the season without rain than we were then, and we already have a major uncontrolled fire to try to contain. The Tubbs fire was the worst one that awful weekend in 2017, but other major fires also started throughout Solano, Napa, and Sonoma counties. I fear the same tonight. Oh, and if these fires strike, the people in their paths and those trying to fight them will be doing so without electricity, because PG&E, having spent years ignoring this problem, has no way to cope with it now other than to turn off the power.

This is life in California in 2019. Southern California right now is already experiencing what I fear will happen here. The Tubbs fire in 2017 and last year’s Carr, Camp, and Mendocino Complex fires are the new normal, except that’s not even accurate because every year’s fires are worse than before. And it’s only going to continue because for decades we didn’t want to face the costs of global warming, not as a society and not the individual companies that have contributed to the problem. And people will die and lose their homes and communities will be lost.

Anyway, I’m sitting here two hundred miles from home wondering if I should drive home now instead of Monday so that I can sit in my house in the dark breathing thick acrid air and be there when my house burns down if it comes to that (though I think that unlikely, perhaps out of false optimism). And this post is my way of coping.