The Eaton and Palisades fires, are now finally, fully contained, raged across the greater Los Angeles area, blasting ash across the entire region and affecting countless families, some much harder than others. As a result, Ms. Wong, the school’s Climate Champion, sat down and talked with me about her role on campus and what students can do about the fires.
What is your role, specifically as the school’s climate champion?
Our job is to support other teachers in transitioning to some kind of climate curriculum, teaching some aspect of their usual curriculum using climate change, climate action, and climate justice as a vehicle. It’s really about helping teachers become more comfortable transitioning to that. Specifically, the way the resolution rolled out in LAUSD is that every school should have one, although that’s not the case now. There are only about two hundred or so across the district.
How has climate change impacted the severity of the fires, and in particular, how were the Sana Ana winds more or less intense due to said climate change?
I’ve been doing some research into this. There’s an excellent site called Yale 360. It’s all about climate, information and communication. A climatologist there has also been looking at this for a long time. What he describes is what’s called the whiplash effect. We saw that 2022 and 2023 were very wet seasons, and you might remember some of the rain and everything, which caused a lot of the brush and the grass to grow. So, there’s a greening effect, and then you get 2024. Last year, we looked at 16 inches of rain between May and December. It’s scorched, and that’s what we’re talking about. On average, we get 4 inches. You get the whiplash extremely wet, followed by extremely dry. You get lots of vegetation that dry out, creating a lot of fuel. So why is this whiplash happening? It’s because of climate change. So, 2024 is the hottest year on record globally. We’re talking about, for the first time in history, in the written record, we’ve exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming since the Industrial Revolution. And this is what scientists have been warning us about. We don’t want to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius, about 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit. It may not seem like very much, but it makes the atmosphere act more like a sponge.
The capacity for the atmosphere to absorb more water vapor is increased when global temperatures rise. You’ve got more ability for the atmosphere to suck up moisture, and that’s going to be dumped somewhere. You get incredibly high precipitation, and then when it’s hot, then the sponge essentially becomes very dry, and you can suck up moisture from everything, including plants. That makes it much drier. Everything is just exaggerated because of climate change.
Then you get the Santa Ana winds, which, as far as I can tell from my research, have no clear and direct relationship between climate change and Santa Ana winds. There might even be some dampening effect. I’d have to do more research, but there isn’t conclusive evidence that it’s worsened. But what you do get is if you get the confluence of all of these things happening together, you get the whiplash, you get the arid season, and then you have these Santa Anas, and they’re all coming together in this confluence, right? Where everything is coming together at once. Then you have a firestorm. For example, the one we saw, and it is, continues to be an issue because if climate change continues unabated, we’re going to see more exacerbation of these events and more whiplash. And then, if they coincide with Santa Ana, it’s awful. And we’re not just seeing it here in California, but we’re seeing it worldwide; we’re seeing fires where people hadn’t even expected to have fires.
So, all of these things came together to make the perfect storm?
Exactly. Anything, just a tiny spark, like the high winds coming down. I read an article today about footage showing the above-ground power lines, any little spark and all those conditions are like fanning a flame, right? All of those things, and bad actors, there could be arsonists, but all it takes is just a little spark. It could even be a weed whacker because the conditions are so dry.
Was the type of plant that grew because of the amount of rainfall and then the subsequent drying? Particularly here, is it extra flammable compared to other plants?
From what I understand, there is mostly just grass-like brush, which is lovely. What do you call endemic or local to this region? Due to the climate and the biome, I don’t know if they are more flammable than other plant types, but because of this atmosphere drying. It can make these plants more flammable, but I don’t know how much more flammable they are compared to other places. But we are seeing fires in different locations, like Australia. There’s a huge one a few years back in Siberia and Canada.
What should our students and families of students do if impacted by the fires?
We are all impacted by the fire. Some of us are affected more deeply, like traumatically. For some of us, it’s more like a background context in which we live. All of us are at increased risk for air quality impacts. Anything under two to five microns is hazardous when we breathe in smoke and ash. They have been implicated in all kinds of diseases, and some you may not see right away. But the effects will add up if we continue to live here. I know that you’re wearing a mask. We see emergencies and more emergency visits to the hospital because of particulate matter, such as smoke and other things.
Even in fires that are not even local to California, like when Canada was burning, there was an uptick of, I don’t know, twenty percent of emergency room visits (A study finds ER visits were up 17% during Canadian wildfires), things like that. As such, we are all impacted by this. You know, my son can’t go to soccer many times in the year because the air quality is not good enough. We must be conscientious because some of it doesn’t appear in purple air. We have to look at wind patterns and things like that. All of that adds, again, impact on us.
I know that our school is collecting stuff in the main office. Clothing, canned foods, and things like that, we can all contribute in that way. There are lots of clothing… being distributed. You’re asking how we can get help if we’re impacted. I would say start in this school by going to the main office and checking to see what is there, talking to the admin, telling them that you have been personally impacted, and seeing what kind of support is provided by the district as well as by the school is what I would recommend, as a first step.
Considering the air quality, how should students protect themselves other than masks? Who should we ask for advice?
I recommend somebody in your family. For our family, it’s my son. He’s like the resident meteorologist at home. So I have him look at the weather whenever we’re about to go to soccer practice or have a game. There are two things he looks at: Zoom Earth and Null School. In both of those places, you can see wind patterns.
If you see wind that’s going to be coming, going across the Eaton burn area and coming towards where you live, you’re going to be impacted. If you see the wind coming off the ocean from coming in and passing through the burn area and Palisades and coming in your direction, you will be impacted. You just want to be mindful of that, so when you see that, we just hunker down at home and don’t do anything. We close all the windows. We turn on our air purifiers and we just hunkered down [and] the rain will help. The rain tamps down some of the ash, making it less airborne. But as soon as it drys up again. That may be an issue again because the ash can be lifted. It might take months for urban areas to be cleared of the ash. The ash potentially remains in rural and wild areas. If you go hiking and do things like that, you see ash. Then, you may want to put on your mask because you don’t want to breathe that in.
Note: Ms. Wong commented on a study explaining how small particulate matter (PM 2.5) in smoke is extremely harmful. It can enter the human body and cause a multitude of issues, including inflammation in the brain. One other study showed that PM 2.5 caused fifty-two thousand premature deaths between 2008 and 2018 in California, which was about five thousand premature deaths per year.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Understanding spreading awareness. Sometimes, I hear students fall into conspiracy theories. There’s a lot of that because our brains just want a quick and easy solution and explanation or even potentially blame something else over hard facts and news that take time.
