On Monday night, the Cabrillo Board of Trustees voted 6 to 1 to approve a resolution that defers renaming the college until 2028.
The decision ends a process that included years of advice, research, consideration, and conflict stemming from a petition to replace the name Cabrillo with one unassociated with conquest, colonization and exploitation.
The Name Exploration Subcommittee that wrote the recommendation and has overseen the process from the outset—whose members included Cabrillo College President Matt Weinstein, trustees Christina Cuevas and Adam Spickler—will be dissolved. It will be replaced in October by a subcommittee tasked with implementing the other recommendations approved by the vote.
Some of the recommendations include: making the college’s disassociation from Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo more explicit, developing an annual Native American Studies lecture series, creating a faculty position in Indigenous and Native American Studies, establishing scholarships for students majoring in Indigenous and Native American Studies, to name a few.
Prior to the deciding vote, two trustees offered competing recommendations.
Trustee Steve Trujillo, representing his Watsonville constituency, wanted to delay the name change by only eleven months, a time he believed as sufficient for garnering the necessary funding.
Trustee Rachel Spencer, a name-change supporter but an outspoken critic of the process, wanted to amend the recommendation to rescind the original vote to replace the college name, thereby starting with a blank slate.
Neither suggestion was met with any approval from the other trustees.
Held in Cabrillo’s historic Sesnon House, the meeting attracted more than a dozen members of the public.
Most who came to share their opinion of the resolution were against delaying the change, with some accusing the trustees of caving to moneyed interests. Some, like faculty member John Govsky, conceded that the community could benefit from a delay, though he called five years “excessive.”
“There’s fear here, I recognize that,” Govsky said. “Maybe it makes sense to take a pause.”.
Fewer of the anti-name change community showed up. Their statements were greeted with smatterings of polite applause, while the advocates of the name change were cheered on loudly.
In conversation with members of the press following the meeting, Trustees Adam Spickler and Christina Cuevas stressed that their decision to delay renaming the college is based on legitimate concerns over the need to fully involve and inform the community. They explained that the length of time chosen for the deferred name choice is somewhat arbitrary and could be changed at a future time.
Cuevas explained that the message the Committee wants to convey is that they listen to the concerns of those who felt excluded from the discussion.
“We need to rethink how this works, and what the timing should be and what the approach would be,” she said. “So let’s go back to the drawing board and figure out an approach that’s more engaging.”
“What we didn’t want to convey is that we caved in,” said Cuevas.
Spickler specifically said he refuses to back down from his belief that a name change is inevitable.
Both are insistent the decision to rename Cabrillo remains, as was shown in the night’s voting.
Trustee Dan Rothwell stated he remained firmly in favor of the change, though he voted for the five-year postponement mainly because the funds needed to implement the change were not yet in-hand.
Cuevas was forthright that money did play some part in the decision to delay, explaining the trustees financial responsibility to acknowledge that the loss of funding is harmful to the students.
By devoting attention to goals like hiring Indigenous faculty and building greater cross-cultural interaction, the trustees expect a growing understanding of what is termed “colonial naming.”
They point to the change in opinions that they witnessed in attendees of the various forums and lectures as proof that views toward the name-change can evolve over time with enough dialog and education.
Spickler looks forward to the coming months and years as time for learning and growing and engaging.
“Invite people in to talk about it, have a dialogue about it, not get entrenched in a yes-no over a college name, where you dig in your heels and that’s the only thing you see,” he said. “That was never our intent. We’re a community that cares about people. Let’s get back to that.”
At tonight’s meeting of the Cabrillo College Board of Trustees, member Steve Trujillo will ask the board to review a recent study by Boston University and the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research that raises the need to eliminate tackle football from all schools.
The study discovered a 41% increase in chronic traumatic encephalopathy for those who play tackle football and a 61% greater risk for Parkinson’s Disease or disease-related symptoms for those who play 3 years tackle football as youth.
Trujillo notes that the San Jose Mercury News called for an end to tackle football at all California public schools in an Aug. 16th editorial. Boxing has already been banned from all high school sports in the U.S. because of head injuries.
Tonight’s meeting is notable for the presentation of the board’s Name Exploration Subcommittee’s recommendation to defer renaming the college until 2028, during which time the focus will shift to creating Indigenous studies curriculum and scholarships for Native American students.
The Board of Trustees meeting is open to the public and will be held Monday Sept. 11 at Sesnon House on the Aptos Campus, beginning at 6:15 pm.
On Monday, Cabrillo Board of Trustees will vote whether to delay renaming Cabrillo College until 2028. In a report published Thursday afternoon, the board’s Name Exploration Subcommittee suggests deferring changing the college’s name until 2028, in favor of addressing the need for greater inclusion of Native American studies, students, and faculty.
“We recommend postponing further investigation and discussion on renaming the college until at least 2028 and potentially longer,” the report states.
The report acknowledges the conflicting opinions over the name-change, which have proved to be divisive, and recommends a plan that “reduces the divisions…and helps unify the community.”
The report suggests expanding the focus beyond the institution’s name-change to include the other needs presented in the original faculty petition that began the name-change process in 2020, with “emphasis on social justice, anti-racism principles, and improvement…beyond the mere changing of a name.”
Other suggestions included in the subcommittee’s report include:
making the college’s disassociation from Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo more explicit
developing an annual Native American Studies lecture series research symposium
establishing a faculty position in Indigenous and Native American Studies
establishing endowed scholarships for students majoring in Indigenous and Native American Studies
exploration of the creation of a Multi-Cultural Center for the college, which would include Indigenous and Native American Studies
including Indigenous and tribal leaders in consultation on recommended actions
Repatriation of any Indigenous archaeological artifacts in the College’s possession
A previous board meeting on Aug. 7 ended with the Cabrillo name-change being delayed until the subcommittee could make a revised recommendation. Factors including the effects of the COVID lockdown, recent floods and fires, and inadequate funding for scientific polling led to a consensus that the process had failed to unite the community around an acceptable decision.
The seven possible names that had been selected by an appointed committee failed to attract enough support from the community and fears that a name-change could jeopardize future college funding doomed the original plan.
IF YOU GO: Cabrillo College Board of Trustees meeting at Sesnon House,Cabrillo CollegeAptos campus Monday, September 11, 5:30 p.m.
The Painted Cork Art Studio in Santa Cruz will hold a Maui Relief Fundraiser Luau at their westside location Friday from 5-8:30pm.
“We are expecting about 150-200 people,” said Kimberly Godinho, founder/operator of The Painted Cork.
All funds and donations go directly to the cause of helping the people in the town of Lāhainā, Hawaii that was hit by a catastrophic fire in early August on the island of Maui. The fires caused widespread damage, killing at least 115 people with close to 400 missing.
Those donating at the event include Food from Pono, Beer from Wood House, Hula dancing by Kay and the Tahitian Dancers, Lei making by Sangita of Redwood Leis, Music by Ben and Friends, Community Art Projects by The Painted Cork, and donations for our silent auction including Chaminade, Paradox, Seascape Resort, Core Santa Cruz, Artwork from dozens of Artists such as Yeshi Jackson and Cindy Morie, and items such as a surfboard, and handmade Hawaiian quilts.
Tickets are $30 and go to Direct Maui Relief.
The event is at 2100 Delaware Ave. Donations can also be made at ki*@*********rk.com.
In an August 30 virtual town hall hosted by the Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency (SCHSA), officials presented the results of two different surveys taken by community members and service providers dealing with the allocation of a nearly $26 million opioid settlement awarded to Santa Cruz County. The $26 million is Santa Cruz County’s share of a national $31 billion settlement from opioid manufacturers and distributors.
The $26 million will be paid out in yearly increments of $1.4 million over the next 18 years.
The national opioid crisis has not spared Santa Cruz County. Deaths from drug-related causes are forecasted to exceed 2022 when 111 people died in Santa Cruz County. Total Narcan use soared in 2023 to over 1200 mg, a single dose being 4 mg.
185 community members took a countywide survey, ranking matching funds for Substance Use Disorder (SUD) facilities and addressing the needs of communities of color and vulnerable populations as top priorities.
Local health care professionals who responded to the survey indicated that funding for crisis stabilization centers as alternatives to emergency rooms and peer support specialists or recovery coaches in emergency departments was of high importance.
The consultation process is designed to “make sure we are intentional and that we are spending the dollars in a way that allows for the greatest collective impact across our communities,” said Casey Swank, director of substance abuse services for SCHSA. An intra-agency committee is coordinating the effort, and local municipalities will be consulted quarterly to stay abreast of their changing needs.
Only 185 community members were consulted for the community survey, which was lower participation than they wanted according to SCHSA senior health educator Julia Anderson.
“We’ll try to get more individuals to take the survey so that it is more representative.” More outreach and surveys are planned Anderson said.
Swank said the committee would focus on the most flexible and cost-effective means to disburse of the yearly payouts
An idea that was dismissed during the town hall was paying for hotel rooms for people with SUD while they get sober. Additionally, big infrastructure projects like building new SUD and out-patient houses were ruled out as too pricey.
A few attendees pressed when the money would be dispersed. Casey Swank reminded the audience that the money will be spent over many years and will be subject to more community input.
“Hopefully by the first of the year we should be able to spend the first of the dollars,” Swank said.
The town hall last week coincided with heightened community engagement around the opioid crisis. August 31 was International Overdose Awareness Day and Watsonville Community Hospital held its first ever “End Overdose” event.
“We hope this will become an annual event. As the opioid epidemic has grown in our area, we’ve increased our support services for patients,” said Nancy Gere, the hospital’s public information officer.
The event hosted speakers from county health staff as well as 17-year-old overdose survivor Aiden Fuller and Lisa Marquez, who lost her teenage son to an opioid overdose in 2020. Marquez’s son, Fernando, died after taking fentanyl-laced counterfeit Xanax.
Attendees of the End Overdose event were given free Narcan and hospital nurses walked them through how to determine the signs of an opioid overdose and how to administer the Narcan in an emergency.
Edward Lovell Jr. steps out of a small homeless encampment on Airport Boulevard in Watsonville on a hot day with his mutt Cotton Candy.
Lovell, 43, estimates he is one of about 20 people who stay in the unsanctioned encampment, which runs up against Corralitos Creek.
Last winter, Lovell says the rising creek forced him and other residents to flee to higher ground. Everything he owned was washed downstream.
Lovell and his fellow unsanctioned campers could see that again, as an El Niño weather pattern expected this winter could bring another series of heavy rains to the Central Coast.
Whether those rains will bring a repeat of last winter—when a series of punishing winter storms brought widespread flooding throughout the county—is still unknown, says National Weather Service forecaster Sarah McCorkle.
But Brent Adams, who operates the Warming Center in Santa Cruz, says that if this winter is anything like last year, we are unprepared—both in services and shelter space.
“Last year’s long-lasting torrential downpours challenged our ability to remain open nightly for the numbers in need,” Adams says.
Good Times spoke with local officials to see what the cities and county are doing ahead of winter to ensure the unhoused people are safe and the services experts say we need to prioritize to prepare for any storms that lie ahead.
Call For More Services—And Shelter
Motioning to a large pile of trash near the road leading from the encampment, Lovell says he wants help from the City of Watsonville to provide basic services—things like portable toilets or a dumpster for trash.
“We’ve been bagging up this garbage,” he says. “But we have nowhere to put it. If (the city) came by with a truck, we’d throw it all in there. This place would be immaculate.”
But such services are hard to come by for homeless people, whose day-to-day existence is made up of trying to protect their possessions and finding the bare necessities, Lovell says.
“If I had a place where I knew my stuff wasn’t going to get stolen or the city wasn’t going to come and take my shit, if I had a stable place, I’d be working,” he says. “I’d be doing something positive with my life.”
Adams is a proponent of a services-based approach to helping the unhoused. As someone who has been providing services for the unhoused for the past few decades, Adams echoes Lovell: if people had a place to store their things, could have access to the basics (hygiene products, essential clothes), they’d have more time to dedicate to bettering their situation.
Last year, Adams had to scale back those basic necessities in favor of keeping the Warming Center operating due to funding restrictions. He wants to see the county and city step in where his organization can’t—both with providing those essential goods and more emergency shelter space.
“Last year’s long-lasting torrential downpours, the need was too much for our organization,” Adams says. “We had to focus on distributing warm and wet weather gear to everyone with focused distributions in areas that were desperate trouble spots, such as the pogonip mudslide and flooding areas.”
Official Response
Officials across the county say they are currently working to clear the waterways of people, focus on outreach programs to notify people of shelter services, contend with debris and establish an emergency alert system county-wide.
The county has a handful of emergency shelter options, including the Watsonville Veterans Hall and Salvation Army in Watsonville and Housing Matters in Santa Cruz.
In the unincorporated parts of the county, the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Community Policing Team plans to monitor encampments and work with other agencies to clear debris and hazards, and offer shelter information and other resources to residents, says Sheriff’s spokeswoman Ashley Keehn.
For encampments near waterways, officials’ first concern is residents’ safety, Keehn says. But they must also contend with environmental factors such as excessive trash, human waste, drug paraphernalia and erosion, all of which pose hazards to public health safety and water quality.
The Sheriff’s department is monitoring several encampments along Corralitos Creek, and working with the City of Watsonville, County Board of Supervisors and public works to address them.
“The placement of these encampments is ever changing, but the Sheriff’s Office Community Policing Team is consistently monitoring the unincorporated area for encampments that pose a threat to our waterways,” Keehn says.
The county and other jurisdictions are also planning to create a common “activation protocol,” a system that facilitates jurisdictions collaborating during severe weather events and lays out steps during such an event.
Santa Cruz County Housing for Health Director Robert Ratner says that the county is working to create more real-time shelter availability information, Ratner says.
But even with the amount of emergency beds available, county officials every year face one grim reality.
“There are not enough shelter beds for all people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in the county,” Ratner says.
What’s In Store for Santa Cruz
The acceleration of climate change and its increasingly severe consequences on the unhoused is just one issue that keeps Santa Cruz homeless response manager Larry Imwalle up at night.
“These events that we’re talking about, like with severe weather, there’s an imminent risk to people’s lives,” Imwalle says. “It’s really life-safety issues that come into play and wanting to make sure that we have solutions and support and infrastructure to help support people in those particularly acute times of need.”
To have solutions and infrastructure in place ahead of this winter, Imwalle says the city is learning from last year’s hard-earned lessons.
For example, the city is searching for a vendor to run an emergency shelter, one that could offer additional spots for people to sleep. Last year, when the January storms wreaked havoc across the county, the city scrambled to put together an overnight shelter at Depot Park. The Santa Cruz Free Guide ran the shelter, which provided a place for around 60 people to seek refuge from the elements, but could only offer a place to sleep for around 27.
The Depot Park shelter will reopen during cold nights, but Imwalle says the city is hoping to offer additional emergency shelter space that, with the Depot Park space, will accommodate 60 people overnight during extreme weather episodes. The goal is to get this emergency shelter up and running by November, ahead—hopefully—of the most severe rain episodes. The city has budgeted around $140,000 for this emergency service.
As of Friday, the city’s two shelters—1220 River Street and the Armory Overlook—might have one or two open spaces, according to Imwalle.
Ahead of the winter storms, the city is also reaching out to unhoused people to alert them of services. But the city only has two full-time caseworkers to do this type of outreach work, in a city that has an estimated 749 of unhoused people, according to the county’s most recent point in time count.
“Having a good shelter plan is critical, last year we went into the season without a concrete plan in place,” Imwalle says. “So we are in a much better position this year, because that is coming together before the winter season. But what’s really important is rather than just the emphasis on shelters, the more we can do to reduce homelessness on an ongoing basis, the fewer people are going to be exposed and vulnerable to severe weather.”
Two of the four people who have signaled their intentions to replace outgoing Santa Cruz County Supervisor Zach Friend for the District 2 seat are veteran policymakers with years of experience in the public sector.
Kim De Serpa, who has served on the Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees since 2010, will face off in the March 5 election against Kristen Brown, who was elected to the Capitola City Council in 2016.
Good Times will feature the other two candidates—Doug Dietch and Tony Crane—in next week’s edition.
The top two vote-getters from the March primary will go on to face-off in the November election.
Kim De Serpa
De Serpa is social services manager for the Salinas Valley Health Medical Center.
She was inspired to work in government from an early age by her mother, who worked for Barbara Shipnuck, Monterey County’s first woman supervisor.
“In my family we have a legacy of public service,” she says.
De Serpa has a bachelor’s degree in social work from Humboldt State University, and a masters in social work from Washington University in St. Louis.
She interned for the Clinton Administration in the Health and Human Services Department under Secretary Donna Shalala. She also served with Fernando Torres-Gil, the Clinton Administration’s chief advocate on aging.
“I think my experience in governing one of the biggest school districts in California—with a $330M budget—has informed my view of governance and how to get things done,” she says. “It would be a great honor to serve the people of the Second District, a place that I’ve called home for 26 years.”
De Serpa says that when people come to their elected leaders, they are seeking help with problems that seem insurmountable. Solving those, she says, takes someone who can address them on both a macro and micro level.
“A lot of people say ‘this can’t be done,’ but I’m an expert at removing barriers and working with other people to open up opportunities,” she says.
As a school board member, De Serpa championed Measure L, a $150 bond measure passed by voters in 2012. Money from that bond has paid for upgrades, repairs and construction projects at every school in the district.
De Serpa says she fought to bring equity to the schools in the northern half of the district at a time when a lion’s share of resources were going to the lower-income ones to the south.
She wants to rethink the way departments such as Planning and Mental Health deliver their services.
“What a lot of people talk to me about is improving county services,” De Serpa says.
Another aspect of that is recruiting and retaining skilled employees, she says. Boosting the county’s economic vitality is an essential step to recruit and retain businesses.
“This is very important because of the sales tax revenue they generate,” she says.
De Serpa also wants to expand the county’s mental health services to include everyone that needs it, regardless of insurance status.
She also wants to increase the county’s stock of affordable housing and preserve agricultural land.
Kristen Brown
Brown is a lifelong member of the Capitola community, with ties dating back four generations. Her great-grandparents owned a coffee shop in the village in the 1960s, her grandfather worked for Capitola Police Department for 30 years and her uncle worked for the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department.
“Public service runs in my family,” she says.
With that as her inspiration, Brown began her political career at an early age when she discovered an innate skill as a rabble-rouser.
In high school, she organized a school walkout to protest her school’s policy of having weight taken in PE class. She also led efforts to demand comprehensive sex education for students.
“No one told me I was an activist, they just said I was causing trouble,” she says. “I didn’t know when I was younger that this was even something I could do. But that was activism; that was leadership skills, but we often tell our young women that they are causing trouble or being bossy.”
After testing out of high school at 16, Brown earned two associates degrees by the time she was 18. It was during this time that she again got involved in activism, this time fighting the potential defunding of Planned Parenthood.
Around this time she also attended CSU Monterey Bay to study global political communications, and interned for Congressmen Sam Farr and Rep. Jimmy Panetta.
“That’s what really got me into government and politics,” she says.
One year after graduating, Brown joined the Capitola City Council in 2016. She served as Mayor in 2020, and will do so again in 2024, when she terms out.
She is Vice Chair of both Santa Cruz Metro Transit District and the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission.
“I’ve had the opportunity to work on causes around housing, transportation and climate change, and it’s been an incredible experience for me to see how things can happen and make a positive difference in the community,” she says. “Now that I’m coming to the end of my time on Capitola City Council, I want to continue to do that on a more regional, larger level than just within the city boundaries.”
Brown’s career reflects her political aspirations. She is Vice-President of Government Relations for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, where she works with jurisdictions on issues such as housing development and transportation.
“So my life kind of revolves around those things,” she says.
Brown says that elected leaders must take heed of the impending economic recession, even as they address the county’s staffing shortage.
Governments must also look to lessen their affordable housing crises even as they put the finishing touches on the RHNA allocation plans.
Transportation planning is also important—as is climate change—both of which are intertwined with housing, she says.
When addressing the homeless population, Brown says she is a proponent of the “housing first” model.
“That’s a housing affordability issue,” she says. “A lot of people are just one paycheck away from becoming homeless and that’s not ok.”
The Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District (METRO) announced last week that it is providing free rides to the upcoming Santa Cruz County Fair.
METRO’S new Route 79F was created specifically to transport fair-goers and will provide free daily service to the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds in Watsonville from September 13-17. Free service on Route 79 weekend trips and daily ParaCruz service to the fairgrounds will also be provided during this time.
METRO has been expanding service to the fairgrounds for the Santa Cruz County Fair for several years in order to increase access and reduce emissions caused by personal vehicles, says Danielle Glagola, METRO’s marketing, communications and customer service director.
In recent years, METRO has seen an increase in ridership to the fair and in response added Route 79F in 2022. Glagola said that the additional route will hit the road every year from now on as they work to remove transit barriers for fair attendees.
Buses will depart from the Watsonville Transit Center at the top of the the hour from noon – 10pm on weekdays and 10am – 10pm on weekends, with return trips from the fair at 25 past the hour from 12:25pm – 10:25pm on weekdays and 10:25am – 10:25pm on weekends.
Expanded service to the fair is part of recent efforts by METRO to increase ridership. Youth Cruz is another program that gives free rides to K-12 students year-round, while Real-Time provides up to the minute bus arrival times to riders’ phones via text message. This winter, METRO will start the initial phase of theri Reimagine METRO initiative, which seeks to adapt local public transit to post-Covid travel patterns and to meet the community’s needs.
Cal Fire Battalion Chief Jon Heggie wasn’t expecting much to worry about when a late summer fire erupted north of Santa Cruz, home to California’s moist and cool “asbestos forests.” This place doesn’t burn, he thought, with just three notable fires there in 70 years.
Heggie’s job was to predict for the crews where the wildfire might go and when, working through calculations based on topography, weather and fuels—the “immutable” basics. For fire behavior analysts like Heggie, predictable and familiar are manageable, while weird and unexpected are synonyms for danger.
But that 2020 fire was anything but predictable.
Around 3am on Aug. 16, ominous thunder cells formed over the region. Tens of thousands of lightning strikes rained down, creating a convulsion of fire that became the CZU Lightning Complex.
By noon there were nearly two dozen fires burning, and not nearly enough people to handle them. Flames were roaring throughout the Coast Range in deep-shaded forests and waist-high ferns in sight of the Pacific Ocean. No one had ever seen anything like it. The blaze defied predictions and ran unchecked for a month. The fire spread to San Mateo County, burned through 86,000 acres, destroyed almost 1,500 structures and killed a fleeing resident.
“It was astonishing to see that behavior and consumption of heavy fuels,” Heggie said. “Seeing the devastation was mind-boggling. Things were burning outside the norm. I hadn’t seen anything burn that intensely in my 30 years.”
Almost as troubling was what this fire didn’t do—it didn’t back off at night.
“We would have burning periods increase in the afternoon, and we saw continuous high-intensity burns in the night,” Heggie said. “That’s when we are supposed to make up ground. That didn’t happen.”
That 2020 summer of fires, the worst in California history, recalibrated what veteran firefighters understand about fire behavior: Nothing is as it was. The August Complex Fire, which spanned an area the size of Rhode Island across the Mendocino National Forest in August 2020, was the largest in California history.
AIRBORNE Smokey conditions create murky dystopian skies. Photo: Tarmo Hanula
As California now heads into its peak time for wildfires, even with last year’s quiet season and the end of its three-year drought, the specter of megafires hasn’t receded. Last winter’s record winter rains, rather than tamping down fire threats, have promoted lush growth, which provides more fuel for summer fires.
Cal Fire officials warn that this year’s conditions are similar to the summer and fall of 2017 — when a rainy winter was followed by one of the state’s most destructive fire seasons, killing 47 people and destroying almost 11,000 structures.
It’s not just the size and power of modern wildfires, but their capricious behavior that has confounded fire veterans—the feints and shifts that bedevil efforts to predict what a fire might do and then devise strategies to stop it. It’s a dangerous calculation: In the literal heat of a fire, choices are consequential. People’s lives and livelihoods are at stake.
Cal Fire crews now often find themselves outflanked. Responding to larger and more erratic and intense fires requires more personnel and equipment. And staging crews and engines where flames are expected to go has been thrown off-kilter.
“We live in this new reality,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a recent Cal Fire event, “where we can’t necessarily attach ourselves to some of the more predictive models of the past because of a world that is getting a lot hotter, a lot drier and a lot more uncertain because of climate change.”
CalFire has responded by tapping into all the new technology—such as drones, military satellites, infrared images and AI-assisted maps—that can be brought to bear during a fire. Commanders now must consider a broader range of possibilities so they can pivot when the firefront shifts in an unexpected way. The agency also has beefed up its ability to fight nighttime fires with a new fleet of Fire Hawk helicopters equipped to fly in darkness.
The state has thrown every possible data point at the problem with its year-old Wildfire Threat and Intelligence Integration Center, which pulls information from dozens of federal, state and private sources to create a minute-by-minute picture of conditions conducive to sparking or spreading fires.
“We’re enlisting cutting-edge technology in our efforts to fight wildfires,” Newsom said, “exploring how innovations like artificial intelligence can help us identify threats quicker and deploy resources smarter.”
Wildfire-originated lightning storms are becoming more frequent. Just last week, a Red Flag Warning from the National Weather Service reported “a higher threat of lightning ignited wildfires” for the Happy Camp and surrounding areas. This warning came on the heels of an earlier lightning storm that prompted northwestern wildfires around Mendocino County. Other affected areas included Humboldt and Trinity counties.
All fires resulted in residential evacuations.
“Wildfires are a fact in California,” Joe Tyler, the chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection told the press in a July conference. “It’s not a question of if, but it’s a matter of when that fire is going to strike.”
MAJOR FLAMES Cal Fire pulls out the big guns to extinguish more intense fire conditions in the state. Photo: Tarmo Hanula
An unforeseen assault on two coastal towns
The 2017 Thomas Fire stands as an example of what happens when a massive fire, ignited after a rainy winter, veers and shifts in unexpected ways.
The blaze in coastal Ventura and Santa Barbara counties struck in December, when fire season normally has quieted down. Fire veterans knew fall and winter fires were tamed by a blanket of moist air and fog.
But that didn’t happen.
“We were on day five or six, and the incident commander comes to me and asks, ‘Are we going to have to evacuate Carpinteria tonight?’,” said Cal Fire Assistant Chief Tim Chavez, who was the fire behavior analyst for the Thomas Fire. “I looked at the maps and we both came to the conclusion that Carpinteria would be fine, don’t worry. Sure enough, that night it burned into Carpinteria and they had to evacuate the town.”
Based on fire and weather data and informed hunches, no one expected the fire to continue advancing overnight. And, as the winds calmed, no one predicted the blaze would move toward the small seaside community of 13,000 south of Santa Barbara. But high temperatures, low humidity and a steep, dry landscape that hadn’t felt flames in more than 30 years drew the Thomas Fire to the coast.
The sudden shift put the town in peril. Some 300 residents were evacuated in the middle of the night as the blaze moved into the eastern edge of Carpinteria.
In all, the fire, which was sparked by power lines downed by high winds, burned for nearly 40 days, spread across 281,000 acres, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and other buildings and killed two people, including a firefighter. At the time, it was the largest wildfire in California’s modern history; now, just six years later, it ranks at number eight.
The unforeseen assault on Carpenteria was an I-told-you-so from nature, the sort of humbling slap-down that fire behavior analysts in California are experiencing more and more.
“I’ve learned more from being wrong than from being right,” Chavez said. “You cannot do this job and not be surprised by something you see. Even the small fires will surprise you sometimes.”
And although it’s not California, the Aug. 8 fire that tore through the coastal town of Lāhainā on Maui, ravishing 2,200 structures and killing at least 115 people, should be noted. Another example of extreme and unusual weather leading to an unstoppable fire with an estimated $5.5 billion, at least, in repair damages, according to Maui Times.
Although the root cause of the Lāhainā fire is currently under investigation, there is speculation that the four power and electric companies running Lāhainā ignored a Red Flag Warning from the National Weather Service. “Warm temperatures, very low humidities and stronger winds are expected to combine to produce an increased risk of fire danger,” wrote the announcement.
There is a pending lawsuit against Maui Electric Company, Limited, Hawaiian Electric Company, Inc., Hawaiʻi Electric Light Company, Inc. and Hawaiian Electric Industries, Inc.
Warmer nights, drought, lack of fog alter fire behavior
Scientists say the past 20 years have brought a profound—and perhaps irreversible—shift in the norms of wildfire behavior and intensity. Fires burn along the coast even when there’s no desert winds to drive them, fires refuse to lay down at night and fires pierced the so-called Redwood Curtain, burning 97% of California’s oldest state park, Big Basin Redwoods.
The changes in wildfires are driven by an array of factors: a megadrought from the driest period recorded in the Western U.S. in the past 1,200 years, the loss of fog along the California coast, and stubborn nighttime temperatures that propel flames well into the night.
Higher temperatures and longer dry periods are linked to worsening fires in Western forests, with an eightfold increase from 1985 to 2017 in severely burned acreage, according to a 2020 study.
“Warmer and drier fire seasons corresponded with higher severity fire,” the researchers wrote, suggesting that “climate change will contribute to increased fire severity in future decades.”
“What we are seeing is a dramatic increase in extreme fire behavior,” Heggie said. “When you have a drought lasting 10 years, devastating the landscape, you have dead fuel loading and available fuel for when these fires start. That’s the catalyst for megafire. That’s been the driving force for change in fire behavior.”
About 33% of coastal summer fog has vanished since the turn of the century, according to researchers at UC Berkeley. That blanket of cool, moist air that kept major fires out of coastal areas can no longer be relied upon to safeguard California’s redwood forests.
Firefighters are losing another ally, too, with the significant increase in overnight temperatures. Nighttime fires were about 28% more intense in 2020 than in 2003. And there are more of them—11 more “flammable nights” every year than 40 years ago, an increase of more than 40%.
The upshot is that fires are increasingly less likely to “lie down” at night, when fire crews could work to get ahead of the flames. The loss of those hours to perform critical suppression work—and the additional nighttime spread—gives California crews less time to catch up with fast-moving blazes.
Also, fire whirls and so-called firenados are more common as a feature of erratic fire behavior. The twisting vortex of flames, heat and wind can rise in columns hundreds of feet high and are spun by high winds.
Firenados are more than frightening to behold: They spread embers and strew debris for miles and make already dangerous fires all the more risky. One was spotted north of Los Angeles last summer.
Fires are “really changing, and it’s a combination of all kinds of different changes,” said Jennifer Balch, director of the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Inclusion Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder and a longtime fire researcher who tracks trends that drive wildfires.
“We’re losing fog. We’re seeing drier conditions longer and later into the season. And so what that means for California right now is, under these record heat waves, we’re also now butting up against the Santa Ana wind conditions,” she said. “I think we’re loading the dice in a certain direction.”
FORESIGHT Firefighting will depend on technological developments as temperatures rise. Photo: Tarmo Hanula
A fire behaviorist’s day
Among the many specialists at work are fire behavior analysts, who are responsible for predicting a fire’s daily movements for the incident commander. As a fire rages, Cal Fire analysts get their information in an avalanche of highly technical data, including wind force and direction, temperature and humidity, the shape and height of slopes, the area’s burn history, which fuels are on the ground and, in some cases, how likely they are to burn.
Gleaned from satellites, drones, planes, remote sensors and computer mapping, the information is spat out in real time and triaged by the fire behavior analyst, who often uses a computer program to prepare models to predict what the fire is likely to do.
That information is synthesized and relayed—quickly—to fire bosses. Laptops and hand-held computers are ubiquitous on modern firelines, replacing the time-honored practice of spreading a dog-eared map on the hood of a truck.
“On a typical day I would get up at 4:30 or 5,” said Chavez, who has served as a fire behavior analyst for much of his career. “We get an infrared fire map from overnight aircraft, and that tells us where the fire is active. Other planes fly in a grid pattern and we look at those still images. I might look at computer models, fire spread models and the weather forecast. There’s other data that tells you what fuels are in the area. You plug all that in to see where the fire will be 24 hours from now.”
At the fire camp’s 8am briefing, “you get two minutes to tell people what to watch out for,” he said. Throughout the day, Chavez says he monitors available data and hitches a helicopter ride to view the fire from the air. At another meeting at 5pm, he and other officers prepare the next day’s incident action plan. Then he’s back to collating more weather and fire data. The aim is to get to bed before midnight.
The importance of the fire behavior analyst’s job is reflected by the sophistication of the tools available: real-time NOAA satellite data, weather information from military flights, radar, computer-generated maps showing a 100-year history of previous burns in the area as well as the current fuel load and its combustibility, airplane and drone surveillance and AI-enabled models of future fire movements. Aircraft flying over fires provide more detail, faster, about what’s inside fire plumes, critical information to fire bosses.
In California, the National Guard is entering the fourth year of an agreement to share non-classified information pulled from military satellites that scan for heat signatures from the boost phase of ballistic missiles. When those heat images are associated with wildfires, the agency’s FireGuard system can transmit detailed information to Cal Fire every 15 minutes.
Meteorologist Craig Clements, director of the Fire Weather Research Laboratory at San Jose State University, has chased fires for a decade.
“We can pull up on a fire, and the radar starts spinning and you’re peering into a plume within four minutes,” Clements said. “It gives us information about the particles inside, the structure of it.”
Fire behavior decisions are not totally reliant on outside data inputs. Seasoned fire commanders remain firmly committed to a reliable indicator: the hair on the back of their necks.
Fireline experience and hard-earned knowledge still counts when formulating tactics. But it’s a measure of how norms have shifted that even that institutional knowledge can fail.
Future of firefighting: AI crunches billions of data points
Perhaps the biggest leap is applying artificial intelligence to understand fire behavior. Neil Sahota, an AI advisor to the United Nations and a lecturer at UC Irvine, is developing systems to train a computer to review reams of data and come to a predictive conclusion.
The idea is not to replace fire behavior analysts and jettison their decades of fireline experience, Sahota said, but to augment their work—and, mostly, to move much faster.
“We can crunch billions of different data points in near real time, in seconds,” he said. “The challenge is, what’s the right data? We may think there are seven variables that go into a wildfire, for example. AI may come back saying there are thousands.”
In order for their information to be useful, computers have to be taught: What’s the difference between a Boy Scout campfire and a wildfire? How to distinguish between an arsonist starting a fire and a firefighter setting a backfire with a drip torch?
Despite the dizzying speed at which devices have been employed on the modern fireline, most fire behavior computer models are still based on algorithms devised by Mark Finney, a revered figure in the field of fire science.
Working from the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in Montana, Finney has studied fire behavior through observation and, especially, by starting all manner of fires in combustion chambers and in the field. In another lab in Missoula, scientists bake all types of wood in special ovens to determine how fuels burn at different moisture levels.
Still, Finney is unimpressed by much of the sophisticated technology brought to bear on wildfires as they burn. He said it provides only an illusion of control.
“Once you are in a position to have to fight these extreme fires, you’ve already lost,” he said. “Don’t let anybody kid you, we do not suppress these fires, we don’t control them. We wait for the weather.”
The Missoula research group developed the National Fire Danger Rating System in 1972, which is still in place today. Among the fire behavior tools Finney designed is the FARSITE system, a simulation of fire growth invaluable to frontline fire bosses.
Finney and colleagues are working on a next-generation version of the behavior prediction system, which is now undergoing real-world tests.
“This equation has an awful lot of assumptions in it,” he said. “We’re getting there. Nature is a lot more complicated. There are still a number of mysteries on fire behavior. We don’t have a road map to follow that tells us that this is good enough.”
By far the best use of the predictive tools that he and others have developed is to learn how to avoid firestarts, he said, by thinning and clearing forests to reduce threat.
“I would love to tell you that the key to solving these problems is more research. But if we just stopped doing research and just use what we know, we’d be a lot better off.”
Still, research about fire behavior races on, driven by the belief that you can’t fight an enemy you don’t understand.
According to an Aug. 25 article by the L.A. Times, a two-month-old AI pilot program out of UC San Diego called ALERTCalifornia is currently working with Cal Fire on ways to further prevent massive wildfires in the state. The program involves 1,039 high-definition cameras placed throughout the state and has been used by six Cal Fire emergency command centers so far.
“The proof of concept has already been so successful—correctly identifying 77 fires before any 911 calls were logged—that it will soon roll out to all 21 centers,” wrote Hayley Smith from the L.A. Times article. To date, the program has flagged 128 incidents to agencies prior to 911 calls, sometimes alerting crews 20 minutes in advance. “Of those, 77 were confirmed to be fires.”
Mike Koontz is on the frontlines of that battle, tucked into a semicircle of supercomputers. Koontz leads a team of researchers in Boulder, Colo., studying a new, volatile and compelling topic: California megafires.
“We began to see a clear uptick in extreme fire behavior in California since the 2000s,” said Koontz, a postdoctoral researcher with the Earth Lab at University of Colorado Boulder. “We keyed in on fires that moved quickly and blew up over a short period of time.” California is a trove of extreme fires, he said.
Koontz is using supercomputers to scrape databases, maps and satellite images and apply the data to an analytical framework of his devising. The team tracks significant fires that grow unexpectedly, and layers in weather conditions, topography, fire spread rates and other factors.
What comes out is a rough sketch of the elements driving California’s fires to grow so large. The next hurdle is to get the information quickly into the hands of fire commanders, Koontz said.
The goal: if not a new bible for fighting fires, at least an updated playbook.
CalMatters wrote this article.Jeanette Prather contributed.
I’m writing to express both disgust and concern that, yet again, the Utility Monopolies put profit before people. This is one of the hottest summers I can remember. If I want to keep my air conditioner on to stay cool and safe, I have no choice but to have a large electricity bill.
And to think that the legislature gave utilities a rubber stamp. It’s disgusting. Their latest hustle to force high bills on us is the so-called fixed-rate Utility tax. This would be the largest monthly utility tax in the nation–by a long shot. And monthly electricity bills will go up for millions of Californians like myself, significantly increasing my cost of living that is already more expensive because of inflation.
Last year, the monopoly utilities reported more than $30 billion in profit. They seem to be doing fine. It’s obvious that these fixed rates are nothing more than a utility tax. That’s a deceptive ploy by PG&E, SDG&E and SCE to protect those profits for their Wall Street investors–all at the expense of California’s working families and our environment.
Ira Kessler
HORSE SENSE
Kudos to GT for publishing the fascinating article by Richard Stockton, “Horse Therapy Rules”, which was published in the Aug. 15 issue. It was an enlightening article which addressed serious subjects such as depression, anxiety, PTSD and how building trust and bonding during close encounters with horses has helped people heal.
Some of the information was a real eye-opener, such as the horse “mirroring” human emotions even if what the person shows on the outside is not in sync with what’s happening on the inside. Horses are so sensitive, they will respond to the fear, anxiety, turmoil or inner peace of the person approaching them. Thanks to Richard Stockton for writing this informative article with humor and heart.
Nadine Kelley l Portland, Oregon
DOWNTOWN BLUES
Having lived in Santa Cruz county for 55 years, I saw the charm, ruralness, green, tranquility and tempo metamorphose into a less-than-appealing demographic. Paved over begonia gardens, biotically-rich farmlands subdivided, Monterey Bay views blocked by condos, homes and businesses. Asphalt, traffic, noise, fumes and impatience spread. Quirkiness, funkiness, mom and pop-ness disappeared. I could brag, saying, “It takes me 20 minutes to bike from Aptos to Santa Cruz, along Soquel Drive.”
Traffic signals were much fewer then. It was pleasant.
Now, increasing traffic stress, carbon emissions, noise and urban temperatures are all increasing. Santa Cruz city policy-makers are considering 12-story high rises and a parking building replacing the farmer’s market. Bordering Beach Hill, Laurel Street and the San Lorenzo River streets would become congested and carbon intensive.
Cal Fire Battalion Chief Jon Heggie wasn’t expecting much to worry about when a late summer fire erupted north of Santa Cruz, home to California’s moist and cool “asbestos forests.” This place doesn’t burn, he thought, with just three notable fires there in 70 years...But that 2020 fire was anything but predictable.
Kudos to GT for publishing the fascinating article by Richard Stockton, “Horse Therapy Rules”, which was published in the Aug. 15 issue. It was an enlightening article which addressed serious subjects such as depression, anxiety, PTSD and how building trust and bonding during close encounters with horses has helped people heal.
