Farms Ablaze in California Wildfires
What started as a thrilling lightning storm spectacle with thousands of lightning flashes and rolling thunder through two nights, ignited countless fires around the Northern California Bay area on August 16, 2020. To date, they burned 85,000 acres in the CZU Lightning Complex fire in the coastal range of Santa Cruz and San Mateo county alone and overall over 1.6 million acres in Northern California with over 100,000 people evacuated.
The photo gallery below shows how the Waddell fire evolved from a small forest fire on August 16 to a raging blaze by August 19th when the rest of the pictures with the burning red sky were taken.
The hills are still smoldering and smoking. Parts of the Bay Area are still very well aware of the crisis due to the smoke that makes for a haze that taints the sun red mornings and evenings. Thousands lost their homes, and farms lost their livelihood. The flames devoured not only buildings, green houses, sheds, and fences, but melted irrigation lines and equipment, cooling and refrigeration units, tools and all.
Seeing so many people suffer and watch the destruction by current wildfires hurt on a deep, emotional level. We suffered with them, when fruit trees burned, tomatoes burst from the heat, the vines, so carefully tended incinerated. It is hard to put this tragedy in words, to even try to understand the loss and suffering that these last two weeks have caused. People lost not only plants and houses, and material things, but many lost their purpose, their history, and their dreams.
Rising from the ashes
The stories of both physical and emotional resilience in the face of this tragedy are deeply moving:
The owners of Living Circles Farm wrote a poem about their experience and the land ) while looking at the smoking trees in their orchard
Dr. Wallace Nichols wrote a heart-felt letter to his daughter who had just left for college a day before the house they built with their own hands was reduced to only the chimney and rubble (SantaCruzWaves posted for Dr. Wallace Nichols).
Diego Saez-Gil, the co-founder and CEO of Pachama shared his thoughts about the lessons inherent in this experience when his house burned to the ground. (On Losing Everything to the Climate Crisis, except for Hope).
People came together as a community and the kindness of strangers brought hope.
When Governor Newsom visited the burned ancient redwoods of Big Basin this week, he summed it up well: “I know when you see these images you feel stress, pain, and you’re anxious — cuz you feel like we’ve lost something forever, I want folks to know — we come and go — these trees though have been around for 13, 14, 1500 years. They have scars that make this fire look modest and they’re still standing. It’s a testament to mother nature and our resiliency and our optimism about our faith and future.”
Where to start?
With so much help needed all around us, it felt as though we had to take action somewhere, so Adrian and I built a page to help some of the coastal farms to get more visibility. We built Save the Farms to make it easy to find links to their donation campaigns. We also put up a GoFundMe site for Sea-to-Sky Farm in Bonny Doon, a few miles up the coast from us. They just started the farm in 2018 and had hopes for expansion for 2020.
As we began to get the word out, the outpouring of help and positivity was encouraging and truly highlighted the strength of our community and passion to have a positive impact. We hope you will visit Save the Farms and check out the progress some of the local farms are making to clean up after the fire, to find what’s left and what isn’t and to start over. If you can - give them a hand - every little bit helps to get them back on their feet again.