The past couple of weeks haven’t done much to dispel them.
In Northern California, fierce Diablo winds helped create the dangerous conditions that prompted Pacific Gas & Electric to shut off power to hundreds of thousands of customers for days.
Then there are the Santa Ana winds, which helped whip up the deadly fires that tore across the southland over the weekend.
The Santa Anas hold a particular place in Los Angeles lore, not only as fire propellants and harbingers of allergy flare-ups but also as a kind of malevolent psychic force, a regional Mercury in retrograde.
That last part rankles Janin Guzman Morales a bit, though.
“The winds have been here since way before we were,” she said Sunday. “The narrative of them being demonized as aspects of nature — I don’t think that’s a fair approach.”
What Guzman Morales, a scientist at University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography who has researched Santa Ana winds, hopes to encourage instead is perhaps less mysterious: thoughtful evaluation of the way we interact with weather in a changing climate.
She said that the Saddleridge and the Sandalwood fires, which have destroyed homes and have been blamed for three deaths, were fueled by typical Santa Ana winds.
“This is mid-October, so this is pretty much the standard, classic wildfire season in Southern California,” she said.
The winds, she said, usually last for a couple of days before they subside, which gives firefighters a chance to control blazes. On average, she said, there are three Santa Ana wind events this month each year.
But the damage that such fires cause is increasing, as scientists have warned, because more people are moving into homes built near where cities end and wild lands begin. Weather is becoming more extreme in general, so this year’s rainy winter has made for lots of material to burn.
Guzman Morales said her research has shown that climate change could make Santa Ana wind events less frequent in fall and spring, and when coupled with projected decreases in fall precipitation, would push Southern California’s wildfire season deeper into winter.
She said it’s tough to predict whether that could contribute to more severe blazes, although her report suggested that back-to-back Santa Ana wind events in December could result in longer burning and bigger wildfires.
While they arrive and move separately, Northern California’s Diablo winds behave similarly to Santa Ana winds, Guzman Morales said, but have been less studied.
“We want to look at the coordination between those two wind regimes,” she said, “and whether there’s a common larger scale reason.”
Updates:
— As of Sunday afternoon, the Saddleridge Fire was 41% contained, according to CalFire. All evacuation orders had been lifted and schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District were set to run on normal schedules Monday, with some outdoor activities limited.
— Officials have not determined the fire’s cause, but they said they’re investigating an electrical tower as the possible ignition point — just as energy companies tried to take precautions by shutting off power to customers around the state.
— The Sandalwood Fire in Riverside County was 86% contained, CalFire said as of Sunday evening. Residents of the Villa Calimesa Mobile Home Park were still under evacuation orders. Officials said they hoped to have the fire fully contained Monday.
— Authorities said a garbage truck driver dumped a burning load of trash by the side of the road, sparking the Sandalwood Fire.
— Forecasts bode well for getting both major blazes under control.
— Power was restored to all PG&E; customers affected by the blackouts. And cooler temperatures are expected to be on the way to the Bay Area, reducing the fire risk.
— The planned outages, experts said, were a low-tech solution to a problem afflicting a high-tech state. They said microgrids could be a potential way forward.
This article originally appeared in
.