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Alan Montecillo [00:00:00] I’m Alan Montesilio, in for Erika Cruz Guevara, and welcome to The Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. Five years ago, a dry lightning storm raged through northern California. After weeks of extreme heat, made worse by climate change, had dried out grass, brush, and trees.
George Morris III [00:00:23] We had a dry lightning event that was epic in proportion, so about 15,000 lightning strikes over a three-day period.
Alan Montecillo [00:00:31] The winds kicked up, and before long, there was fire and smoke.
Brian Watt [00:00:37] Live from KQED News, I’m Brian Watt. A fast-burning complex of fires in the North Bay has forced thousands of people from their
Tara Siler [00:00:45] Lightning-caused fires burning in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties have triggered widespread evacuations.
Erin DeMerritt [00:00:50] The areas most heavily impacted by smoke are South San Francisco, Pacifica, San Mateio, Redwood City.
Julia McEvoy [00:00:58] If you were here, you’d be choking on the smoke right now, Brian. It’s very, very sick and the sun rose blood red just a few minutes ago. People are just waking up and trying to find their way to some sort of normality here right now.
Alan Montecillo [00:01:10] Now, if you were living here in 2020, you remember how it felt. The smell of smoke in the air for weeks on end. That apocalyptic orange sky. And oh yeah, the pandemic was only in its fifth month.
George Morris III [00:01:25] For 2020, we recognized that as it was going on at this year in the middle of a historic event. It is the most consequential fire season of my career. I’ve been working for 29 years.
Alan Montecillo [00:01:42] In the end, these fires killed 31 people and destroyed approximately 9,000 structures. Overall, 4.2 million acres across California burned during the firestorms of 2020, the most in the recorded history of the state. So today on the show, as we mark five years since that orange sky day, we’re bringing you stories from the people who lived through the 2020 fires in their own words. Stay with us.
Nate Ericson [00:02:12] My name is Nate Erickson. I lived in the Bay Area, lived in South Bay up until 2016. Moved up to Sonoma County, lived in Santa Rosa and Petaluma. And then in 2020, I got a new territory. I was in sales in Livermore. I moved to Livermore March 1st, and then March 17th, everything shut down. So my birthday was August 14th. And I decided to go camping by myself up in Humboldt. So I put my phone away, had the best time that I could possibly have in the Redwoods, a very peaceful, amazing time. I was really enjoying myself.
Nate Ericson [00:02:55] But then Sunday came around, I pulled out my phone just to check my route, and that’s when I learned about the fires. I saw my stepmom posting that she was, she and my dad were being evacuated. All the alarm bells in my head went off. And so realized that there was a fire in Mendocino between me and home. And so just trying to figure out all of the details necessary to get home. So I just got on 101 South and started going. As I started to get close to Mendocin, I did start to see just this massive plume of smoke. As I kept getting closer to it, it was just such a surreal experience. And I think I also remember being on 101 and just seeing on the hill to my right, just seeing fire at the crest of that hill right there. And after the previous couple years of the previous fires, that was probably the closest that I had come to actually being face-to-face with the fire. I really just remember this seeing that plume of smoke and just not wanting to keep going. I mean, it’s kind of that fight or flight situation where I don’t want to go towards this anymore, but it’s between me and home. Also just thinking about my parents, my dad and my stepmom, just thinking what’s happening to them. They live still in the Santa Cruz mountains. I came to find out later the fire came within a half mile of their house. My parents got into a hotel, they told me to stay away. They were taking the COVID precautions very serious. They told me they were safe.
Nate Ericson [00:04:42] When I got home, I think that just became a time of doom scrolling and making phone calls. Finding out not just my dad and my stepmom, what’s going on with them, but just other friends with their shelter in place that was happening. I didn’t really have a lot of other options. That was kind of a. Helpless feeling too, because you have your friends that are potentially in danger, and during normal times, you would drive to them and try to support. But at that point, I didn’t really know what to do. Uh, it was very smoky, uh, in Livermore. That I think that was more of a hit to my psyche than just the fire itself. Just because after the previous couple of years of living through similar situations of just breathing in smoke for a couple of weeks, it’s just, it became to be a lot. The week of the orange skies, that was very surreal. Uh, I remember that day very specifically. I was sitting in. Parking lot and that was the day of my review with my bosses. I was so frustrated and just really upset and just like, are we really doing this right now? Does this, we still have to jump through these corporate hoops and fill out, check these boxes and the sky looks like the apocalypse or Mars or something and we’re talking about KPIs.
Nate Ericson [00:06:09] What led to the point of me wanting to move to Wisconsin, I don’t know if it was an exact moment where like a switch flipped, but it was a very quick decision. After the previous years of living through the fires and breathing in smoke and also just the cost of living, I had enough money to purchase a home, but never in the Bay Area. It’s that uncertainty, right? I didn’t know if this was gonna be an annual thing now. It was three years in a row, and then that was kind of the climax of that story, right? I definitely think about that time quite a bit. It’s definitely still like unresolved, unprocessed trauma. Moving here now with the Canada wildfires, pushing smoke into the Midwest. And I was back going to the hardware store to buy N95 masks again. That first time I was just. So upset and we had it again this year so it’s always like a constant annual reminder of just how I felt.
George Morris III [00:07:26] When I look back at that time and 4.2 million acres burned, it is the most consequential fire season of my career. I’ve been working for 29 years. My name is George Morris III, and I am the Northern Region Chief for CAL FIRE. My area of responsibility is from Monterey County up to the Oregon border.
George Morris III [00:07:47] So leading into August 15th, which is when the lightning started, we had a heat dome laid over California for a significant amount of time, and some record temperatures were hitting. We were in the 110 degree range for weeks coming out of that It was a tropical storm, Fausto started to break up and this monsoonal moisture came up the Sierras. And everything came down to in those early moments, allocation of resources and trying to figure out, okay, we have finite resources, namely our incident management teams. Where do we deploy them? Where do commit them? We were on a continuous deployment of resources essentially through that time. And every time you thought you were gonna, you’re gonna get ahead, The original lightning-caused fires gave way to other mega-fires like the glass fire in Napa County and Sonoma County that just continued to stress the system over that period. In my career, every 10 years or so, there’s a lightning siege.
George Morris III [00:08:55] You can look at 1999, 2008, and then 2020. But in the era of the megafire, that propagation of large and damaging fire has just been really pronounced. And for 2020, we recognized that as it was going on at this we’re in the middle of a historic event. Just dealing with the fires on the landscape was a challenge in and of itself, but they were also doing an incredible amount of damage to property. In the example of the North Complex, killing civilians as it moved into Berry Creek, they were significant complex events. It’s funny when I think back on it now, just how hard we were going and for how long. I’m happy that we could limit the damage to 4.2 million acres, given how difficult that operational reality was. So fast forward to today, you know, we learned a lot through that process too. Our technological capability has increased since 2020. We are, our predictive modeling is, is better. It’s at the, it’s at the fingertips of the firefighter now. So the next one we get, the public will be better informed to make good decisions and hopefully loss of life can be We’re in the era of the mega fire and we’re likely to see large and damaging fires in California for a variety of reasons. Climate change is one of those reasons. Encroachment into the wildland-urban interface. Most fires are caused by human activity. It was kind of a recipe there that are making fires larger and more damaging. In my early career, you could go on a 30,000 acre fire and you think I’ll never see anything like that again. But that is a naive thought as a young firefighter because the reality is it’s California, it’s a Mediterranean climate. It has always had a recipe for fire, and fire has always been part of its landscape. But there’s 40 million people on that landscape.
Danielle Venton [00:11:14] Tell me, tell me who you are.
Alana Samuels [00:11:18] Alana Semuels. Right now I’m in New York City, but I live in the Hudson Valley in New york state. Um, so yeah, so I was living in San Francisco. I should start off by saying San Francisco is like my favorite place in the whole world. I love just walking around and seeing all the beautiful views. I remember I saw the went to went to ocean beach to see the sunset and the colors are really vivid and I kind of thought, Oh, that’s unusual. That usually happens when there’s a fire.
Alana Samuels [00:11:46] And over the next couple of days, um, you know, there were, I think there were a couple of fires going on at the time. And the air quality got worse and worse. I was pregnant at the time, so I stopped taking walks outside, the air was really hazy, we didn’t have air conditioning, and it was just really unpleasant. We couldn’t open our windows. We lived in a west-facing apartment, so it got a lot of heat. And I don’t know if I would say sun, because the sun was kind of blocked by the haze and the bad air. But just kind of everything I loved about San Francisco was suddenly gone. My husband and I just kept having this debate of should we open the windows? He didn’t want to because he thought the air quality was too bad. I was just like, we’re suffocating in here. It feels like we’re in some box. And the air got a little cooler at night. So one night I got so desperate, I was so hot that I went outside to sleep on our deck chairs and get some relief, at least get a little breeze or a little cool air. And I remember waking up with just kind of a fine layer of grit on the chairs and on me. And just feeling filthy and going back inside and wanting to hide it from my husband that I’d been outside because he was so worried about the air quality. I think I was about eight months pregnant at the time. And I remember calling UCSF, which is where I was getting care and expecting them to be like, oh, you’re fine, don’t worry about it. And they were like, well, if you’re not breathing properly, then your baby’s not getting the oxygen or just the baby isn’t getting what it needs. And that’s when we decided to rent a hotel room to at least get some air conditioning to feel like I could breathe deeply. It just felt like there was no relief. There was nowhere you could go to get relief and to feel clean and to feel like you’re breathing clean air. And even, you know, I think even in LA it was happening. So it just felt like the world was burning. It wasn’t just San Francisco.
Alana Samuels [00:14:02] We rented Airbnb in South San Francisco, this was probably the worst day. And we woke up and it was like eight and it’s like the sun hadn’t come up. And I was like, did all the clocks fail? Or did what happened? We drove back to our house and it was just like people had their lights on. It was still dark out and it was that day that everything turned orange and for whatever reason, I guess it was the haze and the smoke, the sun just didn’t really come up and you took pictures and everything looked orange and that was when we were really like, this is not sustainable. I don’t know if we can continue to live like this. We had been talking about moving to the East Coast because both of our families are on the East coast, but San Francisco is my favorite place on the planet. And, you know, it’s just a place that kind of makes my chest relax and I just love it. And I think after that summer and after those days, we just felt like we couldn’t go through it again unless we had a lot of money. You know, you can probably install some sort of air purifying air conditioning system. To your house if you own your house, which we couldn’t afford to do. And it just felt like we couldn’t do that summer after summer after Summer. This place is ahead of the rest of the country in terms of what it’s gonna have to deal with, with the water as well. And we just thought it’s just too much of a sacrifice to make, which I’m really sad about. I wish that wasn’t the case because I love San Francisco and I’m jealous of people who are able to live there.
Leigh-Anne Lehrman [00:16:05] I saw the lightning that night and I knew immediately that it was a high fire risk and then I couldn’t reach them because the power went out right away. I am Leigh-Anne Lehrman, and I am a CZU fire survivor, as are my kids. So I had actually just been diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. So I was up, I was actually not staying there that August. I was staying up in Woodside with my fiance. My older daughter was in between her freshman and sophomore year. Of college at Berkeley and her younger sister was only 15 and they were holding out in the fort in Bonny Doon. It’s a rural area, really tight community. We had lived there since 2001 so we were very embedded in the community. The girls obviously grew up there. They were born there in the house that we had. I had just had a double mastectomy like a week before, and we woke up in the middle of the night to lightning strikes all over the place. It was beautiful but also terrifying.
Leigh-Anne Lehrman [00:17:36] Over the course of the next two days, the winds were very strong, it was blowing it right in their direction, and it was spreading by embers from hilltop to hilltop, so it’s spread very, very fast and. It was not looking good for Bonnie Doon. I started really panicking, and then I couldn’t reach them at all. And there was a long night when I was trying to get a hold of them and tell them to get out. I didn’t know if they were there or not now because all the cell phones weren’t working. Finally at six in the morning, I caught a hold a friend of mine who had evacuated down to Davenport, which is where all our neighbors were gathering. And she drove back up there, and they were packing the car when she got there. By that time we knew it was not looking good. And then, you know, there was nothing to be done. We, they were, the girls were safe. They were staying with friends, with all of our pets. And the day that the house burned, I went to a physical therapy appointment and. Uh, somehow in the middle of it, because of a trimfist, as to, you know, what was going on. And I think my house is burning right now as we speak. And she was just, she was like, what are you doing here? So there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. We did have one of my daughters, my older daughter’s friends who was college age, actually snuck past the barricade lines the day before the house burned and to get her cat out of their house. And she happened to call me.
