Thread by @dwallacewells

I spoke to @Weather_West about the very scary fire season to come. He told me he knows a dozen people who've had to outrun wildfire flames over the last five years—something he'd never heard of before, he said. He told me a lot more, too. A thread. (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…

"You talk to firefighters and wildland firefighters who’ve been at this for 20, 30 years, or even families of people who’ve been firefighters for multiple generations. And they’re like, ‘Yeah, every fire we’re on now would have been the career-defining fire a generation ago.’"

"Places are just starting to recognize it. I think California is slightly ahead of the curve, in the sense that it’s coming to terms with the physical reality."

"It hasn’t addressed any of the real issues yet, but it’s acknowledging that these issues are real and are going to get worse. Other places haven’t even gotten to that point yet."

"I think we’re in this transition zone, and it’s going to be rocky. It’s going to be a rocky path. As you know, these transitions are not easy. They’re not linear.”

“Now I’m getting phone calls from people involved in litigation, people involved in policy, people involved in private and public rulemaking, people who are worried about their own homes. ‘What can I do fireproof my property? Do I need to leave California?’ It’s all changing.”

“Most Californians — their experience with wildfire was seeing it on the evening news, watching the live helicopter shots of the Chaparral burning above Los Angeles. Maybe seeing a smoke plume in the distance in the summer. That was the experience."

"And then all of a sudden, in the last decade or so, there’s been this dramatic shift. The majority of people in California have had pretty acute experiences with fire. At a minimum, that involves these smoke storms, these public-health crises, this extreme air-pollution."

"School is canceled. Work is canceled, unless you’re a farmworker and then they force you to work. The sky turns black. You can’t go outside. It’s scary. And that’s the best case scenario — that’s what essentially everybody has now experienced.”

“Colorado hadn’t had the awakening California had until last year, really. And then last year just blew every previous year completely out of the water"—the Californication of the rest of the American west.

"Like, Holy hell, what’s going on? I mean, one of the fires jumped the Continental Divide. In some places on the Divide, there’s two miles of just bare granite. Usually it’s considered the second-best firebreak in the West, the best one being the Pacific. And the fire jumped it."

"Some of these fires burn ten or 15 miles in a night. In Colorado, they were like, ‘Well, we can deal with this tomorrow — if we need to evacuate that town, we don’t need to do it in the middle of the night. We have time.’ They didn’t have time, it turned out." (x/x)