Community feels impacts of state’s wildfires

When Mirella Roberts attended a social event she’d heard about through the Involvement Fair, 30 different people asked her the one question she’d been avoiding for weeks: “Where are you from?” 

“I was probably at the event for 10 minutes, and then I just went into the corner and started crying,” said Roberts, a junior majoring in political science. “My friend was there, and [they asked], ‘Are you okay?’ For the first time, I said, ‘No, I’m not okay,’ and then I came back to my apartment and I cried all night.”

Roberts grew up in South Lake Tahoe, California — a town with 22,000 residents, located in the Sierra Nevada mountains. While Roberts started her first classes of the school year, six hours up north, Roberts’s family packed up her childhood home as the Caldor Fire crept closer to their neighborhood.  

The Caldor Fire started over 40 days ago and has burned over 220,000 acres, destroying at least 782 homes, 18 commercial properties and 203 other minor structures, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. In addition to Caldor, 11 other major wildfires and two extended attack wildfires — fires that are uncontained —  are currently burning within the state. The largest is the Dixie Fire, which has destroyed 1,329 businesses, homes and structures; consumed over 963,000 acres of land; and spread across five counties since it began more than 70 days ago in Feather River Canyon. 

Rachelle DeSantis, a freshman majoring in philosophy, politics and law, has family members throughout Northern California who have been “under threat of evacuation and had to deal with huge amounts of smoke and haze in the air” due to the Caldor and Dixie wildfires. Although none of her loved ones have been hurt, DeSantis said she often worries about her family’s safety during wildfire season, which, in California, takes place from June to September. According to DeSantis, she often checks wildfire maps and air quality index levels on a daily basis, just to make sure her family isn’t in danger.

DeSantis is from a small town in the Bay Area called Los Gatos. While DeSantis lived in the town, she and her friends and family often experienced practice cancellations, school closures and evacuation warnings related to the wildfires. 

“Last year, I had multiple friends that lived more in the Santa Cruz mountains that had to evacuate their homes,” DeSantis said. “They all ended up being okay as well, thank God, but that was definitely really scary.”

Adam Rose, the director of the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Threats and Emergencies, said the economic cost will be significantly lower than that of a hurricane or a tsunami in a major city because most of the damage takes place in the mountains. 

“These [fires are in] rural areas, and in rural areas, you have a lot of low-income people. You also have a lot of people who have summer homes, second homes or they’re retirees, and retirees typically are on fixed incomes and not necessarily wealthy,” Rose said. “So there are some disadvantaged groups that are going to be significantly affected by the wildfires, but as far as the economy’s concerned … impacts on the order of a billion dollars represent something like one half of 1% of GDP. That’s a significant amount, but not anything like the Great Recession.”

Although experts like Rose agree that this year’s wildfire season isn’t likely to have a huge long-term impact on the state economy, many worry about the smoke’s effect on  people’s health. 

Professor of clinical population and public health sciences Edward Avol has lived in Los Angeles his whole life. He said he’s witnessed the air quality in California depreciate over the course of almost half a decade. 

Co-director of the Exposure Factors Core in the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center, Avol specializes in assessing air pollution’s impacts on human health. Currently, he’s working on a project “to look at the impact of wildfire smoke on children coming to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital [Los Angeles]” — particularly children of color, who he said are often more vulnerable to experiencing pollution-related health problems due to disproportionate environmental challenges. 

As Dixie and Caldor continue to spread across the state, Avol said he’s worried about the pollution the wildfires are creating. 

“When a wildfire burns, there’s a lot that gets put into the air, both in terms of the ash and the unburned residue, but also in terms of materials that are burned,” Avol said. “Solvents, synthetics, materials … will be consumed [by the fire] and put into the air. Then, of course, that creates an opportunity for all kinds of toxic and potentially carcinogenic chemicals being delivered downwind into the plume.”

When Caldor began burning, the smoke in South Lake Tahoe was so severe that it “broke” the air quality index. According to Roberts, during the first few weeks after the fire started, her mother experienced “significant health effects from the smoke,” including headaches, “extreme fatigue” and nausea. 

“My mom got air purifiers, she got new filters for the house, but no matter what [she] did, the smoke still made its way into the house,” Roberts said. “It just smelled like fire and it wasn’t good.” 

Around the same time, Roberts also discovered that one of her best friends from high school lived in their car because of the smoke levels and evacuation orders. Roberts said she let her friend stay at her apartment near USC until she “had a safe place to be.” 

Although the past weeks have been “very difficult” for Roberts, now that the fires are getting closer to containment, she said she feels “lucky to have the support system that [she] did” while things remain uncertain.

“My history professor … she took time out of her lecture to direct message me and make sure that I was okay after the fires,” Roberts said. “Then, she messaged me again [two weeks later], and it really meant a lot that she would reach out to me. In a class of over 100 people, she remembered that I would possibly be affected by the fire.”