Lake Tahoe Suffocates With Smoke
NYTimes. August 27, 2021 Outline - Read & annotate without distractions
NYTimes. August 27, 2021 Outline - Read & annotate without distractions
Amid the exodus, which has become a way of life in parts of the West this disaster-filled summer, there has been a creeping concern that the notion of a safe haven is gone, that there soon will be nowhere to run. Everyone from Bay Area billionaires who bought homes along the shores of the lake to workers stunned by surging real estate prices is seeing a sanctuary suffocate.
The smoke and the wildfires that produce it in the West are coming in a time of drought, heat waves, power cuts and, of course, the coronavirus pandemic.
“This is what climate change looks like,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Nature Conservancy. “It’s overlapping crises. People try to escape one crisis and stumble into another one.”
With California halfway through its peak fire season, the Caldor fire is only one of about 100 large wildfires burning in the West. The Dixie fire, the second-largest in California history, started more than six weeks ago and now has a perimeter of more than 500 miles. On Wednesday alone, four large new wildfires spread in California, drawing increasingly scarce firefighting resources.
The crisis in Tahoe extends far beyond the smoke on the water and fire in the sky of one tourist attraction. For hundreds of thousands of people living over the mountain from the lake, in the high desert of Nevada, wildfire smoke this summer has closed schools, canceled sports events and led longtime residents to ask how much longer they can hold out.
“We’re beside ourselves here,” said Amy Ginder, 47, who has lived for decades in Reno, which has been besieged for weeks by smoke from the huge Dixie fire to the northwest. “We have had smoke in the sky literally since the third week of July — we have been inhaling toxins for five weeks now. You can’t be outside. You can’t breathe. You can’t see the sun.”