Nearing the end of fire season, Washington, Oregon and California are all experiencing record-setting blazes. As wildfires encroach on towns and neighborhoods and citizens are evacuated, EMU students with homes in such states must watch from afar, apart from their family and friends.
Senior Kayley Scottlind, a resident of Salem, Ore., first read about the fires in the headlines. “[I read] the news first, freaked out, and called my parents right away.” Since learning about the fires, Scottlind has been checking in daily, inquiring about their safety and the blazes around them.
Despite being out of danger from the fires, senior Ruth Reimer-Berg, like Scottlind, is finding it hard to be away from family at such a time. “It’s been weighing pretty heavily on me,” Reimer-Berg said. “Some days it’s difficult to concentrate on other things.”
The stark change in the atmosphere and landscape has been making headlines for the past week. Many are sharing pictures of the orange haze which has descended upon the west coast, notable in cities like San Francisco.
“It was shocking to see … pictures of my house,” sophomore Olivia Hazelton said. One picture from her father, taken at 9 a.m., looked like “the evening sky.” Hazelton’s family has also been sending her pictures of surrounding neighborhoods, abandoned and burned to the ground.
Reimer-Berg noted how the fires are impacting the land and its people. This year’s wildfires have burned some of Oregon’s oldest old-growth forests. As of Sept. 16, 40,000 Oregonians had been evacuated, the New York Times reports.
Scottlind and Reimer-Berg’s hometown of Salem, being less at risk than other areas, has converted its fairgrounds to a temporary “home” for people and their livestock. This means some kids will be integrating into the local school district, all in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hazelton’s mom, Evelyn Hukari, works as a Forest Unit Manager for the Oregon Department of Forestry. She mainly does logistics and has been setting up campsites for firefighters, ensuring they have the resources they need.
Hukari says though fires are not uncommon around this time of the year, these are some of the worst she has seen, most notably the amount of smoke and hazardous air quality.
In some places on the west coast, the smoke has surpassed the Environmental Protection Agency’s air quality scale. Both Hazelton and Scottlind said most of their family has been staying inside due to how hazardous the smoke is.
“[There was] ash raining from the sky for the first couple days,” Scottlind said, based on the reports from her family. “[It has been] a bit of a Pompeii situation.”
This past Monday, the National Weather Service reported sightings of smoke on the east coast which had been carried on an eastwardly jet stream. The NWS measured the smoke at 25,000 feet high in the air, meaning it will not make a significant difference on the quality of air in the east.
Despite continual pleas for help, the federal government has not been responding as much as Scottlind thinks they should. “I’ve gone from worried to frustrated,” she said. “We’ve basically had to beg for help and nothing is coming.”
President Donald Trump has been reported for blaming state officials of the states of Oregon, California and Washington, despite many of the fires taking place on federal land. As wildfires, primarily in the west, increase, the federal budget for fire prevention has decreased. Between 2001 and 2015, the budget went from $240 million to $180 million.
