Wildfire smoke smells different.
You know it's not your neighbour's barbecue
or a bonfire, you know what this means.
You know you have to go.
The fire quickly spread up the slope, jumped the crest
and began threatening homes.
You're going to have to cut to the left. – Open the gate. Open the gate.
California doesn't really have a wildfire season anymore,
just because climate change has made conditions so extreme.
But typically wildfire season is the fall.
What makes the fall really terrible for these wildfires
is these really fast winds that are also really dry.
So we're talking about relative humidities that are in the single digits.
Just bone dry air outside.
Look at all these hot spots and smoke.
They are everywhere and with wind conditions like this, all it takes
is one big gust for that to go south in a hurry.
At the same time, those winds are pushing the fire
and they don't push the fire just in a line across the land,
they push embers from the fire up and out, over the borders
of the fire into totally different areas, into neighbourhoods
and homes and then those start little fires that then
just expand those fires even more quickly.
So you've got all of these borders expanding at the same time
and that's exactly the kind of behaviour that we've seen in fires over recent years.
You wake up one day and it's gone.
It gets ripped out of your hands and out of your life forever.
I mean, it's never going to come back.
So, human-caused climate change is pushing these fires
further and faster in hotter, drier climates.
Managing all the forests in every way we can
does not stop climate change.
You know, we're seeing roughly the same number of fires
that we always did but now they're consuming much larger areas.
So many more acres and square miles are burned across the state.
Far more than a few decades ago.
The fire was contained in the early afternoon
but not before 36 homes were levelled to smoking ruins.
Fire in California was, for a long time, really kind of a southern California problem
and because of climate change, it's really moved
further and further north.
As the wildfire threat grows in northern California as well ...
Now we're talking about fires across the entire state
and also now into Oregon and even into Washington.
This is just a problem that's moving with the climate.
Heavenly father, please help us.
Please help us to be safe.
A somewhat unique problem that's arisen over the last few years
is that our investor-owned utility companies
are sparking a lot of these fires.
Those companies are now facing huge liabilities because they're burning
down whole communities across the state.
To try to stop the power lines from starting these fires,
power companies have actually just been shutting off the grid.
And it's had, in many cases, even more devastating impacts
on people's everyday lives than the fires themselves.
I mainly travel around on an electric wheelchair
and so I was stuck up here, basically, because the elevators shut down
and don't work in a situation like this when there's no power.
California has really evolved very quickly in response to these wildfire threats.
We saw absolutely devastating fire seasons in 2017 and 2018,
dozens of people killed in these very fast-moving
and spotting wildfires across communities,
and in 2019 the state has really reacted quite differently.
Every time the wind blows we get it right down in our face
and we can't see anything.
Firefighters aren't just responding to fires that are already burning,
they're proactively going through communities and looking for fires.
When winds are up they're staging, already prepared for something to happen.
And we've seen the results of that, which is we haven't had
the same kinds of fires that we did in past years.
That's really extraordinary and marks a huge shift
in how the state government is thinking about what it's going to do
in a fiery, climate-changed future.