The Summer That Changed California Forever

Californians who lived through the 2020 fire siege — the state’s worst fire year on record by some measures — vividly remember the dry lightning storm of Aug. 15.

A blistering summer had pushed temperatures into the triple digits for weeks, priming grass, brush and trees to burn. In mid-August, the remnants of Tropical Storm Fausto swept over Northern California. It brought little rain but pelted the state with 15,000 dry lightning strikes.

That storm set off a siege of wildfires unlike anything California had ever seen — a season that upended lives and rewrote the playbook for fighting fire. Five years later, the fires sparked by that lightning storm remain a turning point for California.

The 2020 fire season burned more land than any in recorded state history, reshaped firefighting strategy and left thousands of people — from mountain residents to state officials — permanently changed. As climate change fuels hotter summers and more explosive blazes, the lessons of 2020 matter more than ever.

“We woke up in the middle of the night to lightning strikes all over the place. It was beautiful, but also terrifying,” said Leigh-Anne Lehrman.

She was staying in Woodside, recovering from cancer surgery, away from her home in the Santa Cruz Mountains.  Her daughters, one in college and one in high school, stayed behind to hold down the fort.

She knew enough about the wildfire risk in her neighborhood to be “instantly very concerned because both the girls were there alone,” Lehrman said.

Not far away, Brian Dean, also a resident of the mountains, remembers the wind. His wife woke him up and said:

“‘Look at how windy it is out there. Lightning is everywhere,’” Dean recalled.

She stepped outside onto their deck, which was covered in sticks. “She turns around to come back in to get her shoes and right then, like half of a redwood [tree] landed right on the deck,” Dean said.

Farther north, Sonoma County resident Nate Ericson was camping in Humboldt County for his birthday when he saw a post on Facebook that family members were evacuating their homes.

“I’m freaking out,” Ericson recalled. “I start driving home. And I see the Mendocino Complex Fire. Just this massive, massive plume going up into the sky, like everything in me was, ‘Turn around, you’re going the wrong way, but I had to get home.”

A season like no other

Wildfires fueled by extreme heat, supercharged by climate change, roared across an area of California larger than the combined land mass of Delaware and Rhode Island. The firestorms lasted for months, destroyed 9,000 structures and killed 31 people, forever altering the lives of countless more — some fled, others were imprinted by fear and distrust — and the operations of CalFire, the state’s firefighting agency.

Following the mid-August lightning strikes, several hundred fires sprang up, some merging into massive “complexes.”

“We ended up in a situation where we had multiple megafires going on at the same time,” said George Morris III, a  CalFire region chief responsible for the units from Monterey County up to the Oregon border.

Land burned in and to the north of wine country in the LNU Lightning Complex, in the East Bay not far from San José in the SCU Lightning Complex, and to the south in Santa Cruz County, where a series of fires ignited outside of Big Basin State Park that smoldered for days where firefighters could not access them, Morris said. “That was a ticking time bomb.”

Winds that kicked up around Aug. 18 caused a turning point. Separate fires coalesced into the CZU Lightning Complex Fire that ripped through 85,000 acres, burning some redwood forests not typically home to megafire and the communities of Boulder Creek, Bonny Doon.

The sound of the CZU Fire approaching Dean’s home in Bonny Doon reminded him of the movie Backdraft.

“It sounded like a jet airplane,” he said. “And at the same time, you hear propane tanks exploding in the background as the fire was coming down the mountain.”

Power and cell service were out. Many of Lehrman’s friends evacuated, and she worried about her daughters. “I started really panicking, and then I couldn’t reach them at all.”

Firefight overwhelmed

As Lehrman panicked about her daughters, fire officials across the state faced a grim reality as the scale of the disaster overwhelmed firefighters. Wildfires continued to flare up — in Plumas, Tehama, Glenn, Butte, Modoc —  practically everywhere.

The August Complex, which started as 37 separate fires, merged into the state’s first recorded “giga-fire,” topping a million acres.

“Every time you thought you were going to get ahead of the original lightning-caused fire, it gave way to other mega fires,” Morris said.

Figuring out how to position fire crews was somewhat like playing the game Risk. If you spread out on the board too far, Morris said, “Now you’re not prepared to deal with a threat here.”

Morris said 2020 was a watershed moment in his 29-year career. He blames the severity of the fires on climate change drying out vegetation, the increasing encroachment of housing into the wildland urban interface and human activity starting fires, mostly by accident.

“Our largest and most damaging fires really have occurred in the last 20 years. That’s the reality,” Morris said. “There were damaging fires in the past, but they weren’t happening at the same time.”

California, with its Mediterranean climate, has always had a recipe for fire and it’s always been part of the landscape. But now, with 40 million people on that land, it’s a problem like it has never been before.

Many of the 2020 fires, said Zeke Lunder, “ran like crazy for a few days and [then had] a lot of beneficial effects after that initial wind-driven run.”

Lunder is a fire mapper and analyst. He runs well-informed but unofficial video briefings about fires through his YouTube channel and media company, “The Lookout.”

After the start of September, he said things took a turn for the worse. Winds shifted and moved from land to the ocean, ripping across forests hot, dry and fast — winds like the Santa Anas — and they tend to be associated with the most damaging fires.

Sept. 8 was an “Armageddon” wind event that blew up fires across the West Coast, including the Bear Fire in Butte County that ran 30 miles and killed 16 people in a single day.

Intense winds blew flames up a canyon, blocking evacuation routes. The Bear Fire was part of the North Complex Fire, an amalgamation of several fires along the middle fork of the Feather River. It was one of the many areas around the state that did not and could not get all the help they wanted as officials coordinating the response made hard decisions with fires threatening Livermore, Susanville, Quincy and other big cities.

“Then we have this fire out here in the middle fork in a roadless area that’s like 20 miles from the nearest cabin,” Lunder said. “It’s like, OK, well, those guys aren’t getting any air tankers.”

In the end, the firestorms of 2020 burned 4.2 million acres across California — the largest number since records have been kept. It’s believed to be on par with the average number of acres burned in the state prior to western settlement, when fires started by lightning were allowed to burn freely and when native Indigenous people intentionally set fires for many purposes.

After 2020, CalFire said it increased its ranks and boosted year-round positions, invested in aircraft that can fight fires at night and adopted technology that helps firefighters know better when a fire has sparked, how it is burning and what it might do next.

To capture memories from the 2020 fire siege, Morris wrote a 122-page report of the event from CalFire’s perspective, which includes a timeline and narrative accounts, printed in large format and placed in each station around the state. It’s bigger than most other items on the shelf, Morris said, “so that people always remember the weight of 2020.”

Moving on, with scars

In Sonoma and Santa Cruz counties, Lehrman, Dean and Ericson did their best to make it through. Ericson did arrive safely back at his home in Sonoma County. But the stress of season after season of fires — on top of housing costs — made him decide, California just wasn’t worth it.

“I needed to go,” Ericson said. “That almost broke me, and I had to move to save my mental health, so that’s why I’m in Wisconsin now.”

Dean and his wife lost their house in Bonny Doon. It’s been rebuilt and just finished. He’s waiting for the final inspections. He credits the county with trying to make it easier for people rebuilding to get permits.

Still, construction was a pain and expensive — he hadn’t known he was underinsured. And now his insurance costs have soared. Before the fires, he paid about $2,400 a year. Now it’s $9,000.

Still, he said the experience has helped him better cope with stress, or maybe just worry less.

“When something that bad happens and something else bad happens, you’re just numb,” Dean said.

Lehrman’s daughters and the pets did get out safely and stayed with friends while the fires raged. Their home burned. Finding a new house to rent in the area, so her youngest daughter could remain at the same high school, felt near impossible. Lehrman contacted 40 landlords before one said yes.

She is now recovered from cancer and lives in Woodside with her husband, though she would rather not live in the mountains anymore. She said she leaves for her dad’s home in Santa Rosa whenever the weather feels ripe for fire.

“Whenever there’s high wind or it smells like smoke, anything like that, I’m gone,” Lehrman said. “I have a very, very low threshold for evacuation.”

The experience helped her realize how little she needs to be happy, that family doesn’t depend on a certain house.

“I’m not sure I would have believed that before,” Lehrman said. “I always associated family with our home, but now we can reconstitute our family dynamic in any room that we are in.”

Her advice to other Californians facing fire risk: prepare, get good insurance — even if you’re a renter — and know there’s life to live after you get through it.

Preparation is good advice. As apocalyptic as the fires may have felt for Californians living through it — and they did feel bad, especially in the midst of a pandemic when many people were forced to stay inside due to weeks of toxic smoke — dry lightning bursts down onto California roughly every decade.

“You can look at 1999, 2008 and then 2020,” Morris said. “But in the era of the megafire, the propagation of large and damaging fire has been really pronounced.”

That means another lightning-driven wildfire is highly likely in the near future.

As another fire season looms, the lessons from five years ago remain clear: California’s survival depends on how quickly it adapts to a world where megafires are the norm.