Earth Day serves as both a celebration of the planet we all call home and an opportunity to take stock of how its climate is changing before our very eyes — which recently in California has meant longer droughts and bigger wildfires.
The state experienced a wake up call on October 9, 2017 when the Tubbs Fire ripped through Santa Rosa. After the blaze initially broke out just outside the city, high winds rapidly pushed the flames into its suburbs.
"Things escalated quickly and before long we were running for our lives," Melissa Geissinger, a survivor of the fire, told KCBS Radio. "When we were able to get back to our neighborhood, it looked like it was a war zone, like a bomb had gone off. It was just decimated."
The blaze killed 22 people, and destroyed over 5600 buildings. Geissinger said she lost everything.
The Tubbs Fire was the first of a series of record breaking wildfires in California which have ravaged the state in the years since, highlighted most recently by the Dixie Fire last fall.
"I'd be crazy to say I’m not concerned about more and more wildfires," San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson told KCBS Radio. She explained that the blazes are putting a strain on fire departments across the state, which operate in a mutual aid system.
"We've seen over the last 10 years fires just getting worse and worse and bigger and bigger," she added.
Sadly, wildfire experts say these conditions may be the new normal.
"We're seeing our weather get more extreme, more drought, more wildfires and, while Earth Day is a reminder, we’re not really doing anything," Craig Clements, Director of the Interdisciplinary Wildfire Research Center at San Jose State, told KCBS Radio. "So I always think, 'what can we do more of?'"
He said the only way to address the root of the problem is to "reduce our carbon output, so we can reduce global warming and hopefully we can get our leaders to push that agenda."
Meanwhile Geissinger — whose family also survived the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire — is now writing a book about the Tubbs Fire. She is hoping to change the minds of climate change deniers.
"We as people, we're a unique species where we actually get to have an effect on change, for worse or for better," she said. "We have an opportunity."
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