You’d be hard-pressed to dream up a nastier confluence of crises besieging California right now. Over the weekend, Tropical Storm Fausto propelled moisture from off the coast of Baja California up into the Bay Area, spawning rare summer thunderstorms. At the same time, the region has been baking under an intense heat wave that has desiccated vegetation, which all too easily combusted when those thunderstorms rolled through. Since Monday, almost 400 wildfires have broken out, most of them sparked by lightning. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated across Northern California, and 350,000 acres have burned so far. Overextended fire crews have contained very little of it thus far, as still more wildfires continue to ignite across the state.
All of this is happening during a pandemic that has killed almost 12,000 Californians, forcing people to remain sheltered in place at home. And to make matters even worse, in the middle of a heat wave, they can’t open their windows because air quality is now astonishingly bad as smoke continues to pour into the Bay Area. (Witness the awfulness in real time with this map.)
“Currently, there is a wildfire burning in every county in the San Francisco Bay Area, except for San Francisco,” says Kristina Chu, acting communications manager at the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. “So it's just insane the amount of smoke. The Air District and the Bay Area in general have experienced wildfires in the past, we recognize that. But it hasn't been at this level. And that's why there is so much smoke everywhere.”
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