A Climate Story
Never underestimate the absolute power and destruction that a wildfire is capable of.
Two years ago today, January 6, 2021, is a day that I will never forget, but not for the reasons you might think. I spent that entire day without a cellular phone wearing a hazmat suit and respirator hearing bits and pieces of what was happening in the outside world. I was with a group of really great scientists and professionals tasked with entering burn areas affected by the 2020 Labor Day fires in Oregon to test for hazardous materials (like asbestos) prior to cleaning up the debris. It’s hard to describe what a 1700+ degree Celsius wildfire can do to things like a car window or an aluminum ladder. The truth is that things just burn until there’s only metal or aggregate or a few other odds and ends left and what’s left just kind of melts in place. Never underestimate the absolute power and destruction that a wildfire is capable of. And never think that you’re somehow immune to them because none of us are. My climate epiphany strangely occurred on January 6.
Glass melts around 1500 degrees, aluminum around 650 degrees, and most types of asbestos melt around 800 degrees. The fires in southern Oregon near Phoenix and Talent were estimated to hit 1700+ degrees. Typical wildfires range around 800-1,000 degrees, but these are fueled by years of drought and unfavorable weather conditions, making them an outlier. Another extreme. And on January 6, 2021, we were dropped in the middle of a residential area and tasked with assessing the hazards present and testing to see how the debris could be managed during removal in the aftermath of the Alameda Fire. It’s difficult to describe what a former gun safe that was full of, I imagine, all sorts of things looks like after it explodes. The feelings you get when you’re walking though areas where people’s homes had once stood is also difficult to describe. Parts of you just block it out and focus on your work. The ever present but relatively low risk of puncturing a boot or stepping into a void space you didn’t know was there meant I really needed to keep my head in my work and not on the folks who had lost their homes or the insurrection chaos in Washington. The entire experience was bizarre. And January 6 was the first day.
For my day job I’m a geologist and a public servant. In 2021 I was working as a consulting geologist and was lucky enough to have been in and through a lot of unique and professionally rewarding experiences. No experience I’d ever had was quite like walking through a burned-out neighborhood picking through debris collecting samples. We weren’t the first in though. EPA had an initial team come through and try and identify potential hazards like propane tanks, but honestly there wasn’t much left that was combustible. We were the second ones in. My understanding was that many folks hadn’t even been allowed back into the area because no one knew if it was really safe to do so or not. So that was our task. Get samples and figure out how to manage the debris safely.
Glass melts around 1500 degrees, aluminum around 650 degrees, and most types of asbestos melt around 800 degrees.
As a geologist you learn about a lot of things. Climate science was being talked about when I was in college, and I suspect (hope) it’s being talked about a whole lot more these days. If you’re taking a geology course somewhere and they don’t mention climate you should find a better school because nearly every geology topic is impacted by climate change. You hear a lot about global changes in sea level and how that’s impacted by climate. In colder times more of your global water resources are locked up in ice near the poles and sea level is low. In warmer times there’s little to no ice and a lot of that water is in the sea meaning higher sea levels. We actually live in an ice age, believe it or not, but during something that’s called an interglacial period where there’s a slight lull in the ice age and warming occurs creating less ice in glaciers and higher sea levels. This happens naturally when times of increased volcanic activity releases greenhouse gases and increases global temps. It ebbs and flows, naturally, cyclic. But with 10s of millions of internal combustion engines on the roadways of the world at any given moment, it’s difficult to imagine all of those exhaust pipe emissions NOT creating significant problems, and quickly. Couple that with other emissions from industry and aircraft and your brain kind of runs out of room to visualize these things. And there’s a tremendous amount of data showing our current climate predicaments are mostly human caused and are focused on greenhouse gas emissions. But the other wonderful things we humans do like pave and build out large areas, deplete groundwater resources to water relatively biologically dead lawns, and consume resources with little thought of the impacts directly result in situations where our screwed-up climate creates conditions to fuel extremely hot wildfires.
As human caused climate change continues to impact our daily lives, it’s hard to not wonder if the folks who lost their homes in the 2020 wildfires thought that would ever happen. I certainly, for years, thought things like “that would never happen to me, here” maybe foolishly feeling that our community services could keep up with fire dangers. I suspect the folks in Phoenix and Talent thought the same thing. I recall reading interviews of folks at the time who were confounded that their homes had burned. I’ve also lived in Vancouver long enough to see what July 4th celebrations are like here and honestly surprising it hasn’t happened here yet. People can unfortunately sometimes devolve into absolute idiots when they get a firework in their hands. And Vancouver in July is always a tinderbox. The groupthink of folks thinking things will never happen to them or the small but wasteful things we do don’t really impact the world around us is part of the reason we’re all in this climate mess and why it continues to be perpetuated. Don’t fall for it. It’s truly a scam.
I always thought that I was some who got it. Who got what human caused climate change was. I'm a scientist and a data person and I got it, right? It really took wading into the aftermath of the Alameda Fire for something to really click.
While my time in wildfire cleanup was incredibly humbling to experience, I feel like I grew a lot, so much so that my January 6 climate epiphany directly influenced me to create Vancouver Bee Project. Encouraging folks to grow more native plants, create more habitat and forage for pollinators, and do responsible and actionable things to help pollinators in Vancouver. While the absolute power of wildfires can be humbling, we often feel like we have no power to fight something like that. I disagree. We make decisions every day that fuel both positively and negatively the climate crisis. Making a concerted effort as a community to make good decisions with respect to climate and pollinators locally and telling all our friends in the world to do the same is one, I think, very powerful way to combat climate change. And I challenge you to have your climate epiphany but until then try and make decisions with climate in mind. Your neighbors and ecosystem will thank you.