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After Five Years of Extreme Wildfire Seasons, Here’s What I’ve Learned
And what I still need to do to protect my safety
It’s the beginning of June and fire season already kicked off a few weeks ago. Every year, it seems to come earlier and earlier. Before 2020, in fact, it would have been staggeringly unusual to have smoke-choked skies before late July.
Now, however, navigating the threat, inconveniences, and actual destruction of wildfires has become a norm from May through October.
I’m already panicking. I feel like I have PTSD thanks to the last five fire seasons. Trust me, you would, too.
It all kicked off with the 2020 fires that tore through 1.2 million acres in my state and blanketed us with an AQI of over 500 (meaning it was so high, it was literally off the charts) for a week, bringing everything in my region to a standstill, and until now, ended last season with yet more air pollution and five days without internet, thanks to a wildfire that destroyed my provider’s fiber lines.
I thought we had at least six more weeks before things got bad again, yet here we are in early June, three hours into a power outage that has knocked out four cities and various outlying areas in my region.
