To understand my thinking on the Kincade fire in Sonoma County, California, you need to understand the location of the transmission line that sparked the blaze.[1]
This is by no means in a remote location, even if Santa Rosa Press-Democrat reporters think it is,[2] which is what some might say of the Camp fire’s origin last year.[3] The line runs from a geothermal plant in Geyserville which itself is on a mountainside.[4] At night, the lights from this plant can be seen for miles and I couldn’t even begin to tell you the number of times I saw them as I drove home down Highway 101. Most folks in this part of the world would tell you pretty much the same.
It’s not very far from Santa Rosa, which is California’s seventh largest city. As you drive north from Santa Rosa, you pass through Windsor, then Healdsburg, and then (here, Sonoma County becomes more rural than urban), a little farther north and mainly, but not very visibly, on the east side of the freeway, there is Geyserville.
So, of course, I was wondering how such a line could have been neglected. As it turns out, Pacific Gas and Electric chief executive Bill Johnson said the line had been repeatedly inspected and “appeared to have been in excellent condition.”[5] Which is to suggest that even well-maintained lines are vulnerable to wind conditions such as led to this failure.
Yes, as Gavin Newsom says, the power outages meant to prevent wildfires and the fires that happen anyway are “about dog-eat-dog capitalism meeting climate change, it’s about corporate greed meeting climate change, it’s about decades of mismanagement,”[6] but it may also be about the limitations of humanity against nature and the ideology that says the former must conquer, rather than live in harmony with, the latter.[7]
I am remembering that when I was a kid, we knew that yes, in October it was still fire season, but we pretty much could figure we were in the clear if we’d made it this far. Even in September, after that final heatwave we called—I wonder what American Indians think of the term—“Indian Summer,” we were thinking the fire season was winding down.
Not any more. In 2017, the Sonoma County wildfires struck in October. In November 2018, the Camp fire, in Paradise, over 100 miles away, reduced visibilities in Sonoma County and much of the San Francisco Bay Area to a few hundred yards.
“This is the new normal that we live in,” David Hagele, mayor of Healdsburg, just south of Geyserville, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s disheartening, and it’s scary for a lot of people because it does bring back a lot of scary memories from a couple of years ago.”[8]
I haven’t been present for the power outages this year and so far as I know, they haven’t yet affected the place where I lived. But I remember, with the energy crisis toward the end of the dot-com boom, the eerie silence as I walked into the building where I worked and a sense that we had exceeded our limits, that our hubris was meeting a colder reality.
I can’t help but think that California is facing that reality again now.
- [1]Reis Thebault, Kim Bellware, and Andrew Freedman, “High-voltage power line broke near origin of massive California fire that forced thousands of evacuations,” Washington Post, October 25, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/24/fast-moving-wildfire-ignites-northern-california-wine-country-prompting-evacuations/↩
- [2]Randi Rossman and Will Schmitt, “Broken PG&E tower discovered near origin of Kincade fire on The Geysers geothermal power property,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, October 25, 2019, https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10216601-181/kincade-fire-starts-inside-the↩
- [3]Joseph Serna and Taryn Luna, “PG&E power lines caused California’s deadliest fire, investigators conclude,” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-paradise-camp-fire-cal-fire-20190515-story.html↩
- [4]Randi Rossman and Will Schmitt, “Broken PG&E tower discovered near origin of Kincade fire on The Geysers geothermal power property,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, October 25, 2019, https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10216601-181/kincade-fire-starts-inside-the↩
- [5]Bill Johnson, quoted in Reis Thebault, Kim Bellware, and Andrew Freedman, “High-voltage power line broke near origin of massive California fire that forced thousands of evacuations,” Washington Post, October 25, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/24/fast-moving-wildfire-ignites-northern-california-wine-country-prompting-evacuations/↩
- [6]Gavin Newsom, quoted in Reis Thebault, Kim Bellware, and Andrew Freedman, “High-voltage power line broke near origin of massive California fire that forced thousands of evacuations,” Washington Post, October 25, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/24/fast-moving-wildfire-ignites-northern-california-wine-country-prompting-evacuations/↩
- [7]John H. Bodley, Victims of Progress, 5th ed. (Lanham, MD: Altamira, 2008); Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1991); Alice Outwater, Water (New York: Basic, 1996).↩
- [8]Reis Thebault, Kim Bellware, and Andrew Freedman, “High-voltage power line broke near origin of massive California fire that forced thousands of evacuations,” Washington Post, October 25, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/24/fast-moving-wildfire-ignites-northern-california-wine-country-prompting-evacuations/↩