Julie Turkewitz

As they worked through charred auto shops and trailers, Alba kept thinking about the poisons they were kicking up and that they did not have a single mask or hazmat suit among them.

For generations, firefighters fought mostly in desolate forests, where most of the dangers were fatigue and falling trees. But a confluence of modern factors — namely America’s rapid suburban expansion into the wilderness, combined with the growing ferocity of wildfires — is posing a host of new health threats to the men and women who fight these blazes.

While burning wood poses some threat to lungs, man-made products and the gases and particles they produce when burned are far more dangerous.

In the last three years, California has seen a record number of devastating fires, and thousands of firefighters have been exposed to chemicals they had not previously encountered in such high volumes.

Unlike urban firefighters dealing with structural blazes, these wildfire responders do not wear heavy gear that filters air or provides clean air because the gear is unwieldy and too limited to allow the kind of multihour, high-exertion efforts demanded on the front lines of these large outdoor infernos.

But some think more needs to be done to keep wildland firefighters safe.

Alba, who has been with the San Francisco Fire Department for 18 years, spent 11 days working in Paradise, California, last year, in a smog so thick it burned his lungs. As he picked his way through the wreckage, he said, his crew began to fall sick: severe headaches, brutal coughs.

“I was just thinking about 9/11,” he said of the many firefighters who fell ill after the 2001 terrorist attacks. “I asked myself: Is history repeating itself here?”

On Thursday, California’s fight against fire continued. More than 7,000 firefighters were battling blazes up and down the state, including new wildfires in the heavily populated areas of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, fueled by rushing winds that for days have pushed flames through brush and dry fields and up the sides of homes.

The fires began just as winds eased in the north and firefighters wrangling the state’s largest active blaze, the Kincade fire, managed to contain more than half of its 76,800-acre footprint for the first time.

About 5,800 people remained under a mandatory evacuation order, a small fraction of the 180,000 who had been ordered to leave their homes Sunday. Residents and firefighters were beginning to survey the damage Thursday as many in Northern California and parts of Southern California began to return home.

Several studies have examined the health of firefighters who battle structural blazes in urban areas. The largest, a look at 30,000 people by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, acknowledged that urban firefighters may be exposed to carcinogens like formaldehyde, benzene and asbestos, and found that firefighters have higher rates of several types of cancers than the population as a whole.

This has led some health advocates to declare an “epidemic” of cancer among urban firefighters and to call for better equipment and health care.

Less is known about the health of wildland firefighters. Though that is changing.

After the 2017 Tubbs fire that whipped through the Santa Rosa area, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, working with the San Francisco Firefighters Cancer Prevention Foundation, analyzed blood and urine samples of about 150 firefighters. They found that in their blood many had elevated levels of mercury, as well as perfluoroalkyl substances, human-made chemicals known as PFAS, which have been linked to cancer.

The findings suggested that the chemicals may have been released from material burning in buildings or had even came from firefighters’ protective gear. PFAS, an increasingly controversial class of chemicals that are used as fire retardants, are often present in firefighter uniforms.

The exposure is compounded by dangers that firefighters have faced for years.

In Northern California this month, more than 5,000 firefighters and support staff gathered to fight the Kincade fire, turning the Sonoma County fairgrounds into base camp, a sea of white tents and dirt-smudged firefighters taking breaks from their 24-hour shifts.

The morning briefing included tips on avoiding exhaustion and falling trees — and a warning to watch out for the region’s abandoned mercury mines. (For decades starting around the 1870s, mercury was pulled from the ground and used to separate gold from other rocks. Many of those mines were never fully cleaned up.)

A flyer handed out to firefighters said the mines posed “no health or inhalation hazards” if they were exposed to fire, as they had been capped with soil. But officials at the Bureau of Land Management said that was incorrect — that at least three of the mines had exposed waste that could be dangerous if hit by heat. (Cal Fire later issued a corrected version of the flyer.)

More modern threats come from the growth of the country’s wildland-urban interface, a term increasingly used to describe the area where homes and forests meet.

As cities have become more expensive, these areas have become increasingly attractive places to settle, and more than 12 million homes were built in this liminal space between 1990 and 2010. With more people in the woods, there are more structures to defend.

More than 80 people died in the Camp fire near Paradise last year; most lived in areas that were basically wilderness. Firefighters now have to contend with protecting people who live in areas that some consider uninhabitable and the fallout of homes burning in these isolated locations.

At base camp in Sonoma, many said they were aware of these expanding chemical dangers. Cal Fire has a research and development team that is working to develop better gear for firefighters, said Eric Castellanos, a captain with the department.

But there is division among firefighters about exactly what should be done to protect them. Alba, the firefighter who was in Paradise, is calling on fire agencies to remove PFAS from their uniforms and for officials to come up with a solution that protects them from noxious threats.

But Scott Ross, a firefighter from Shasta County, said he worried that more restrictions — heavier gear, for example — would make it harder for them to do their work.

“This is not a safe job,” he said. “You can’t make it safe. And the more you try, the more you tie our hands.”

This article originally appeared in

New Threats Put Wildfire Fighters' Health on the Line

SANTA ROSA, Calif. — As fires spread across Northern California last year, Capt. Matt Alba and Strike Team 2253A found themselves wading through a smoldering jungle of plastic and metal in search of bodies.

The agency posted “red flag” warnings for most of Northern California and much of Southern California, taking effect at various times Tuesday.

Forecasters were predicting winds between 50 mph and 70 mph in Los Angeles County and Ventura County starting late Tuesday and continuing Wednesday and Thursday, with some gusts up to 80 mph in the mountainous areas of Los Angeles County, the National Weather Service said. The scale for Category 1 hurricanes begins at 74 mph.

The winds, known as Santa Anas in the southern part of the state and Diablos in the north, arrive regularly in the fall. Recent research suggests that as the climate warms, Santa Ana winds may become less frequent. Coupled with precipitation changes, that could mean more intense fires later in the year.

Red-flag weather has played an important role in driving the growth of the Kincade, Getty and other fires and has prompted preemptive blackouts by utility companies hoping to keep wind-damaged power lines and equipment from touching off more blazes.

The Kincade has burned through 75,000 acres and was 15% contained Tuesday afternoon, officials said. Two firefighters were injured while battling the blaze, one of whom was airlifted to the University of California, Davis hospital for treatment of serious burns. The firefighter was in stable condition, the authorities said.

Evacuees and residents were expected to face freezing temperatures overnight Tuesday in the inland valleys, the National Weather Service said.

The Getty fire was caused by an ‘act of God.’

The Getty fire, which has prompted the evacuation of more than 7,000 homes in Southern California, started when a branch broke off a tree and hit nearby power lines — an accident that Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles called an “act of God.”

The power lines began to spark and ignited nearby brush, Garcetti said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. He said investigators had not found any evidence that faulty equipment started the fire.

The fire, which has burned at least 650 acres and was 15% contained, broke out shortly after 1:30 a.m. Monday along the major freeway known as the 405, near the Getty Center. It quickly spread through neighborhoods north of Brentwood, destroying 12 homes and damaging five more.

The authorities determined the cause in part after seeing dashcam footage that showed an explosion on the side of the road early Monday, Garcetti said.

Earlier Tuesday, Garcetti thanked residents who had remained away from their homes in the evacuation area. He said that firefighters had extinguished some flare-ups, and he warned that higher winds expected in the evening could pick up embers from the fire and deposit them on houses in the evacuation area, possibly igniting them while residents who did not evacuate were sleeping.

That danger was reiterated by Fire Chief Ralph Terrazas, who said that hot embers have been known to carry for miles on the wind. “Our goal today is to increase containment as much as possible,” he said, adding that he was “very concerned about tonight’s wind event.”

PG&amp;E; will compensate customers for an earlier blackout.

Pacific Gas and Electric said Tuesday that it would issue rebates to customers affected by the intentional blackout that began Oct. 9, addressing a request made repeatedly by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The rebate, $100 for residential customers and $250 for small businesses, is a one-time adjustment tied to the power cutoff, which was carried out as a fire-prevention measure and left 738,000 customers in the dark.

No decision has been made about rebates for subsequent outages, including one imposed over the weekend and another wave that began Tuesday morning.

On Saturday, PG&amp;E; cut power to 970,000 customers — the equivalent of almost 3 million people — as high winds blew across Northern and Central California, with gusts in some places reaching 102 mph. Of those customers, the company said, about 400,000 remained without power Tuesday and may not regain it before the new round of blackouts hits their areas.

PG&amp;E; said about 597,000 customers would be affected by the outage that began Tuesday as fiercer winds moved through the state. The conditions were expected to continue through midday Wednesday.

Even with the power cutoffs this month, the utility’s equipment is a suspected cause at least four wildfires, including the Kincade fire in Sonoma County.

Cowboy 911 rescues livestock and other animals.

Groups of volunteers in Northern California have spent days aiding in livestock and animal rescue since the start of the Kincade fire, lending their physical skills, expertise and equipment.

Among them are team of wranglers known as Cowboy 911.

What started as a Facebook group of 1,500 people last summer has turned into a sprawling network of 28,000 members.

“When I set up the group, I wasn’t even thinking about things like wildfires,” said Justin Jones, a 38-year-old horse trainer. Instead, he formed Cowboy 911 thinking it could be a resource for community members stuck in smaller situations, like if the wheels fell off an animal trailer and someone needed a hand.

But California and its wildfire seasons, which have become increasingly destructive in recent years, had different plans for the group. Last year, its members responded to calls during the Carr and Camp fires, helping to rescue — by Jones’ account — more than 5,000 animals between the two fires. Its Facebook wall now serves as a message board, connecting people during natural disasters.

Jill Lasaley Pierre, the group’s co-founder and Jones’ wife, said they had been responding to a lot of goat rescues, as well as ones for horses, sheep and llamas.

On Tuesday morning, she dispatched the team to the Middletown area, after receiving a request at around midnight from a woman who was located just on the edge of the evacuation line. The woman said she had five horses but only two trailers, which meant she would have had to leave some of her horses behind.

To box in fires, crews chop trees and yank roots.

It is an arresting scene, the dangers unimaginable: firefighters clad in yellow and green flame-resistant uniforms, battling a wind-whipped and fast-moving blaze with what amount to farming and logging tools.

Fighting fires — including immense untamed wildfires — requires a combination of brutal force, endurance and skill. From the air, firefighters may release water and retardant, which can slow a fire’s spread but will not extinguish the raging flames. The most effective man-made way to contain a wildfire is to box it inside buffer zones that are absent of everything that burns — a laborious, intense pursuit that requires clearing the land.

Members of a 20-person crew work in a line, hacking at the hardened ground, chopping down trees, yanking out roots and sawing down undergrowth. It is a carefully choreographed ballet, where one person’s movements affect the next’s.

“Imagine, if you can, 16-hour days of manual labor where you’re hustling all the time, and you do it oftentimes for 14 days straight,” said Doug Harwood, a firefighter in the city of Prescott, Arizona, who spent years fighting wildfires in the Western United States.

The mechanics of the job have not changed considerably since 1910, when a monster wildfire known as the Big Burn devoured 3 million acres and killed 85 people across three Northwestern states, and a U.S. Forest Service ranger named Ed Pulaski returned from obscurity a handy tool that can both dig soil and chop wood.

The Pulaski, as it is known, combines an ax and an adz in one head and is arguably the most important piece of equipment in wildfire suppression.

Alan Sinclair, who commands one of 16 teams trained to manage the most challenging wildfires in the United States, said team leaders have to weigh the risks of clearing land when flames may be racing toward them. At some point, it may be too risky, he said.

Communities can help, he said, by working together to create buffer zones around them, what is known as “defensible space,” before a fire strikes.

“It’s really hard for firefighters to go into an area where no work has been done and be expected to save the neighborhood,” Sinclair said.

Naming a wildfire is easier than containing it.

As ashen skies, raging wildfires and blackouts blanket areas of Northern and Southern California, many residents and evacuees are relying on Twitter hashtags for up-to-date information about their homes, loved ones, road closures and further evacuations.

Over the past week, “Kincadefire,” “Gettyfire,” “Tickfire,” “Skyfire” and “Sawdayfire”— the names of the wildfires — have become popular search terms on social media. But often there is confusion as to where their names come from.

As opposed to the predetermined list of names provided for hurricanes, wildfires are named by officials according to the location or local landmark, including streets, lakes and mountains, where the fire broke out. Fires often go without names if they are too small.

“Quickly naming the fire provides responding fire resources with an additional locator and allows fire officials to track and prioritize incidents by name,” Cal Fire said.

If there is a long human presence in the area, there’s no challenge in finding a name — officials just draw from geographically local, named landmarks, according to Susie Kocher, a natural resources adviser at the University of California.

The 2003 San Diego Cedar fire, one of the largest wildland fires in state history, unsurprisingly spread across the Cedar Creek Falls area. It burned over 270,000 acres, destroyed more 2,200 homes and killed 14 civilians and one firefighter.

But when it comes to naming there are always weird exceptions. The 416 Fire, for example, burned more than 50,000 acres in Colorado in 2018. Why 416? According to the Durango Interagency Dispatch Center, it was after a “system-generated number” that represented the 416th “incident” in the San Juan National Forest that year.

Another curious choice was in 2015, when fire officials in southeast Idaho ran out of naming ideas following the outbreak of a swarm of fires. For a fire with few landmarks nearby, they went with “Not Creative.”

The worst kind of weather for wildfires — strong, gusty winds and very low humidity — was expected to return Tuesday after a relative respite Monday, the National Weather Service said, raising the prospect of more fire outbreaks and rapid growth of the blazes that are already burning.

California Fires Fanned by Strong Winds

Jawara was long hailed for promoting tolerance, human rights and the rule of law at a time when sub-Saharan Africa was dominated by authoritarianism and military regimes.

He was president of his small West African nation until 1994, when, in a bloodless coup, it fell into the hands of Yahya Jammeh, a young officer who embarked on a brutal 22-year rule.

Some of Jawara’s success came from the contacts he made before he became a politician, when he traveled the countryside vaccinating cattle in his 30s, an experience that connected him with broad swaths of his nation.

“There’s not a cow in the Gambia that doesn’t know me personally,” he liked to say.

Jawara, a bespectacled man of modest bearing, negotiated independence in 1965, part of a wave of liberation movements that reshaped the continent in the 1960s. He was elected Gambia’s first president in 1970.

His death comes at a particularly raw time for Gambia. Jammeh, his successor, recently lost a presidential election and fled the country. A new president, Adama Barrow, was democratically elected, and the nation is in the midst of truth and reconciliation hearings, which have laid bare the atrocities of Jammeh’s rule. Several of Jammeh’s lieutenants have recently admitted to murdering suspected dissidents.

The investigations and disclosures have left many feeling nostalgic for the Jawara era and deeply aware of the vulnerabilities of Gambia’s democracy.

Dawda Kaibara Jawara was born on May 16, 1924, in Barajally Tenda, a small town in the Gambian interior, while the nation was under British control. His mother, Mama Fatty, was a homemaker; his father, Almami Jawara, a merchant.

Jawara studied veterinary medicine at the University of Glasgow. On returning to Gambia, he converted from Islam to Christianity, took the name David and married a Christian woman, Augusta Mahoney.

He had worked as a veterinarian and was the country’s chief veterinary officer when he decided to enter politics, having grown convinced that Gambia had to follow in the footsteps of neighboring countries, including Ghana, Guinea and Nigeria, and become independent.

At the time, his schooling made him one of the most educated people in his country, and he was chosen by members of the new People’s Progressive Party, or PPP, to be its leader. The party generally favored capitalist development and liberal democracy, with a reliance on international donors for help.

From the outset, Jawara’s success was improbable. He inherited a system of poor social services, including a limited number of schools and hospitals, and an export economy based mostly on groundnuts.

But he encouraged agricultural diversification and mostly avoided extravagant spending, winning him praise.

He saw an opportunity to improve tourism with the publication of “Roots: The Saga of an American Family” (1976), the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Alex Haley that begins with the tale of one of his ancestors, Kunta Kinte, in the Gambian village of Juffure. Jawara declared the town a national monument as a way to encourage visitors.

“Gambia has no prestige projects, no grandiose spending projects, no political prisoners, no army and no defense budget,” The New York Times wrote in 1977. “Its elections are perhaps the cleanest on the continent: it has opposition parties and a free press, including several mimeographed broadsides that attack the Government in roundhouse punches.”

Some in Gambia, however, wanted more rapid improvement, and one of Jawara’s greatest challenges came in 1981, when a young Marxist named Kukoi Samba Sanyang led an attempted coup. At the time, Jawara was in London attending the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer (who became the princess of Wales). Without a military, Jawara had to rely on President Abdou Diouf of neighboring Senegal to send in troops to push out the rebels.

The coup failed, and Jawara returned to the capital. Officials put the Gambian death toll, including rebels and civilians, at 500; some put it higher.

Jawara maintained a competitive party system and held free and fair elections. After independence, his party won in every general election.

In a biographical essay on Jawara, the Gambian journalist Alagi Yorro Jallow attributed this success to Jawara’s skillful use of political patronage to persuade opponents to side with him.

He also wrote that with Gambia divided among many ethnic groups — including the Mandinka, the Fula, the Wolof, the Jola and the Serers, all of which speak different languages — Jawara had shown great skill in creating a broad demographic coalition, uniting an “educationally deprived rural populace” with an urban elite.

But Jallow wrote that many citizens eventually lost faith in a party that had so much power. Moreover, an ambitious economic recovery program opened the door to more and more corruption, further eroding trust in the government and Jawara’s party.

In 1994, soldiers led by Jammeh, then a 29-year-old lieutenant, stormed Banjul and took over the government. Jawara escaped aboard a U.S. Navy warship that happened to be anchored off the coast of Banjul. He lived in exile in London.

Jammeh ruled in ways Jawara had fought against. The new leader outlawed opposition parties, muzzled reporters and sent soldiers to attack political protests. Some compared political conditions in Gambia to those in North Korea.

Jawara returned to Gambia in 2002. Gambians voted Jammeh out in 2016, and Jawara lived just long enough to see his country return to democracy.

His marriage to Mahoney ended in divorce. He eventually returned to Islam, taking two wives in accordance with Muslim tradition. Survivors include his wives, Chilel Jawara and Njaimeh Jawara, and several children.

Last Thursday, at a funeral held at the National Assembly in Banjul, Jawara’s coffin was draped in the Gambian flag. A large crowd of supporters gathered for the service, some dressed in white and black, local colors of mourning.

Critical voices accused Jawara of having tolerated corruption, making him vulnerable to the attempted coup in 1981 and Jammeh’s successful one in 1994.

But Mariam Jack-Denton, the speaker of the Gambian National Assembly, called him a “continental symbol” who had helped found the Organization of African Unity, an important economic and social development body now known as the African Union.

“Here lies a man who has fought for the independence of this country from colonialism and built it from scratch, despite pressures from colonial masters,” Jack-Denton said, addressing the crowd.

She added, “With sound judgment, dignity and leadership, President Jawara proved all critics wrong by guiding our nation to unprecedented development.”

Dawda Jawara, Founding Father of Gambia, Dies at 95

Dawda Jawara, a veterinarian-turned-politician who led Gambia to independence from the British and then presided over the country as it became one of Africa’s longest-running democracies, died Aug. 27 at his home in Fajara, a coastal suburb of Banjul, the capital. He was 95.

He joins a field so packed with candidates that it now includes six of his colleagues in the Senate and his former boss, John Hickenlooper, a past governor of Colorado.

“I think this country faces two enormous challenges,” he said in an interview on “CBS This Morning.” “One is a lack of economic mobility and opportunity for most Americans and the other is the need to restore integrity to our government.”

Until recently, Bennet, a former school superintendent usually known for his professorial reserve, was not considered a presidential contender.

But in an uncharacteristically fiery speech on the Senate floor in January, during a government shutdown, he excoriated his Republican colleague Ted Cruz of Texas, shouting repeatedly as he accused him of shedding “crocodile tears” over unpaid government workers. He denounced President Donald Trump for shutting down the government over his desired border wall, which Bennet termed a promise the president could not keep and America did not want.

The speech was viewed millions of times online, widely aired on cable news and led to calls for Bennet, 54, to consider a presidential run.

“He revealed that he is capable of anger and passion,” said former Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado, a longtime friend of Bennet’s, who said the senator had come to him recently to discuss a possible campaign. “When it gets to be that blatant, the hypocrisy on the other side, you have no choice but to speak out.”

Bennet now faces the challenge of setting himself apart in the Democratic field and competing against better-known candidates, some of whom have been laying the groundwork for their campaigns for months or years.

Among them is Hickenlooper, who once hired Bennet as his chief of staff.

“They are friends,” said Hart. “They will be polite to each other. They’re not going to go on background and stick a knife in one another.”

Bennet was asked Thursday about the high number of Democrats running (he is the 21st to declare his candidacy). “This is the opportunity for us to show what we stand for, for us to have a competition of ideas,” he said. “I think it’s phenomenal that we’ve got as diverse an array of candidates as we have, in all respects, and that we’ve got the number that we have.”

Bennet became a senator in 2009 after he was appointed by Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat who needed to fill a seat left empty by Ken Salazar, who had just become interior secretary. Bennet narrowly won re-election in 2010, then cruised to victory in 2016. He has described his top issues as education, climate change, immigration, health care and national security.

In early April, Bennet announced that he had prostate cancer, but he said he would not let it deter his presidential aspirations.

“I am fortunate it was detected early,” he said at the time, “and as a result, my prognosis is good.” In mid-April, he had surgery that his staff called “completely successful.”

As a senator, Bennet is best known as a member of the so-called Gang of Eight, the bipartisan group that crafted a sweeping immigration reform bill in 2013. The legislation, which would have provided more than $46 billion to bolster border security while also carving a path to citizenship, passed in the Senate but never made it to the House.

“If the president-elect really wants to fix our immigration system, he should study the work of the Gang of Eight,” Bennet wrote in an editorial in The Denver Post in 2017.

During his tenure, Bennet has developed a reputation as a studious senator with a habit of mulling decisions for weeks. He has bucked the more liberal base of his party on a number of big issues, including his support of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. His frustration with the Trump administration, however, has brought him more in line with colleagues to his left.

His maternal grandparents were Jews who fled the Warsaw Ghetto, moving their family out of Poland to Mexico and eventually to New York. (Bennet’s parents raised him with Jewish and Christian traditions.)

His younger brother, James Bennet, is the editorial page editor of The New York Times. James Bennet recused himself Thursday “from any work generated by the opinion desk related to the 2020 presidential election,” The Times said in a statement.

After stints as an aide to the Ohio governor and as counsel at the Justice Department, Michael Bennet came to Colorado, where he took a job with the Anschutz Investment Co., restructuring corporate debt. He later joined the administration of Hickenlooper, then the mayor of Denver, and spent several years as the superintendent of Denver Public Schools.

He lives in Denver with his wife, Susan Daggett, a natural resources lawyer, and their three daughters.

In January, after his impassioned speech on the Senate floor, Bennet went on MSNBC, where he was asked if he was considering a run for president.

“I’m thinking about it,” he said, adding that he thought the nation was moving in a “terrible direction.”

“Donald Trump is much more a symptom of our problems than he is the creator of our problems,” the senator said. “He is an accelerant. He was sent here to blow this place up. That’s what people in my state who voted for him said. And guess what? They succeeded. But now we’ve got to pick up the pieces.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/michael-bennet-president-2020.html" id="b4b3b7aa-4de2-31b3-aa54-c3563fe6028b">The New York Times</a>.

Michael Bennet, Senator From Colorado, Is Running for President

DENVER — Michael Bennet, the moderate, studious Democratic senator from Colorado known for his work on education and immigration reform, announced his candidacy for president Thursday.

Bennet became a senator in 2009 after he was appointed by Gov. Bill Ritter. Bennet narrowly won re-election in 2010, then cruised to victory in 2016. He has described his top issues as education, climate change, immigration, health care and national security.

As a senator, Bennet is best known as a member of the so-called Gang of Eight, the bipartisan group that crafted a sweeping immigration reform bill in 2013. The legislation passed in the Senate but never made it to the House.

“My plan is to run for president,” he said in an interview on “CBS This Morning.”

“I think this country faces two enormous challenges,” he added. “One is a lack of economic mobility and opportunity for most Americans and the other is the need to restore integrity to our government.”

Bennet was born in India, where his father was stationed as an aide to the U.S. ambassador. He served as a congressional page in his youth and received his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University and a law degree from Yale, where he was the editor of the law review.

His maternal grandparents were Jews who fled the Warsaw Ghetto, moving their family out of Poland to Mexico and eventually to New York. ( Bennet’s parents raised him with Jewish and Christian traditions.)

His younger brother, James Bennet, is the editorial page editor of The New York Times.

A spokeswoman for The Times, Eileen Murphy, said that James Bennet plans to “recuse himself from any work generated by the opinion desk related to the 2020 presidential election.”

Michael Bennet, the moderate, studious Democratic senator from Colorado known for his work on education and immigration reform, announced his candidacy for president Thursday.

The release of the documents prompted dozens of Swarthmore students to storm the Phi Psi house in protest on Saturday. They had been camped in and around the house in the days since, demanding the dissolution of Phi Psi and the school’s other fraternity, Delta Upsilon.

In a message, the school’s president, Valerie Smith, said both fraternities had “decided to disband and relinquish their houses.”

The Swarthmore documents, published by The Phoenix and Voices, both student-run publications, read like a series of fraternity meeting minutes. In them, the authors discuss acquiring date-rape drugs and brag about sexual encounters with underage girls, among other topics. The release of the documents and the subsequent sit-in forced the small school to the center of a larger debate about sexual assault on campus.

In a message posted on Facebook, members of Phi Psi wrote that they voted unanimously to dissolve their fraternity after a week of deliberation.

“We were appalled and disgusted by the content of these minutes,” they wrote, “which led us to question our affiliation with an organization whose former members could write such heinous statements. We cannot in good conscience be members of an organization with such a painful history.”

The documents seem to chronicle activity mostly in 2013, before current Phi Psi members entered college, with what appear to be some earlier and later entries.

“Since the start of our membership, we made it our mission to improve the culture and perception of Phi Psi,” they said. “Unfortunately, the wounds are too deep to repair.”

Members of Delta Upsilon published a similar message. “Delta Upsilon has listened to the concerns and feelings of the campus community,” they wrote. “We hope that our former house will provide a space that is inclusive, safe, and promotes healing.”

Protesters have argued that the documents, though dated, were indicative of a dangerous fraternity culture that continues to exist.

After the announcements, protesters crowded the yards outside the fraternity houses, pumping their fists in the air as they cheered.

“Who’s house?” one man yelled. “Our house!” the crowd responded.

Amal Haddad, 18, a freshman, was among the protesters.

“Everyone kind of thought there was nothing we could do to get rid of them,” she said. “So this sit-in and the result of the sit-in was just a shocking and tremendously celebratory event.”

Haddad said protesters were likely to continue the occupation until the university met a larger set of demands related to its handling of sexual assault. “We don’t have a plan to leave just yet,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/swarthmore-fraternities-rape-attic.html" id="80f1048b-c522-3351-abcd-d90df6981c5a">The New York Times</a>.

The two fraternities at Swarthmore College, the elite liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, announced Tuesday that they would voluntarily disband, following the release of more than 100 pages of internal documents in which members of Phi Psi discussed sexual misconduct and referenced a “rape attic.”

Swarthmore Fraternities Disband After Uproar Over 'Rape Attic' Documents

Dozens of students at Swarthmore College, the elite school in Pennsylvania, stormed a fraternity house this weekend after campus publications leaked these details from a lengthy document in which members of the school’s Phi Psi fraternity bragged about sexual conquests and referenced sexual assaults.

The protesters, who call themselves the Coalition to End Fraternity Violence, have been camped in and around the fraternity house since, calling on the school to dissolve Phi Psi and the school’s other fraternity, Delta Upsilon.

The occupation places Swarthmore, a small liberal arts school with a progressive reputation, at the center of a continuing national debate over sexual assault on college campuses.

The documents, the protesters say, are evidence of what they have been trying to tell university administrators for years: The school’s fraternity houses are dangerous places and should be shut down.

“I’ve told the fraternity liaison,” said Morgin Goldberg, 22, a senior who has been sleeping in the Phi Psi house since Saturday as part of the protest. “I’ve told the dean of conduct; I’ve told the old dean of students; I’ve told the new dean of students; I’ve told the president.”

Goldberg, who said she was sexually assaulted by a member of Phi Psi as a freshman, said that the presence of the so-called rape attic has been known around campus for years, and that she had notified administrators of the dangers of locked rooms in fraternity houses on at least 20 occasions.

In a letter to students, President Valerie Smith, a scholar of African-American literature who has led the school since 2015, called the fraternity documents “heinous” and said that “the racism, misogyny and homophobia described within them is antithetical to the values of the college.” She has temporarily suspended fraternity activity pending the results of an independent investigation.

The school is also in the midst of a larger examination of fraternity life on campus.

Sexual assault has long been a problem on college campuses, but calls for administrators to curb violence have intensified in the last decade, and in particular in the wake of the #MeToo movement. In 2015, an extensive survey from the Association of American Universities said a quarter of college women had experienced sexual assault since their freshman year.

In response, schools across the country have introduced courses about sexual consent, reviewed the way they handle allegations of assault, and stepped up counseling for survivors.

But the question of how to handle fraternities has dogged administrators for years: Critics say fraternity houses encourage drunken partying and sexual misconduct, while supporters say many of them build camaraderie and foster future professional relationships.

The Swarthmore documents, published by The Phoenix and Voices, both student-run publications, read like a series of meeting minutes between fraternity brothers and appear to chronicle life at Phi Psi between 2010 and 2016. This means many of the people mentioned in them have since graduated. But students say they are representative of the current atmosphere.

In early April, Goldberg and other students started a Tumblr account in which students could publish anonymous accounts of encounters at fraternity parties. One wrote of being raped in a basement with a “foreign object.” Another wrote of running away as two intoxicated fraternity brothers shouted a homophobic slur.

Swarthmore police did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the assault accusations.

In a statement on Facebook, the fraternity distanced itself from the documents.

“We wholeheartedly condemn the language of the 2013 and 2014 notes, as they are not representative of who we are today,” the statement said. “All our current brothers were in high school and middle school at the time of these unofficial minutes, and none of us would have joined the organization had this been the standard when we arrived at Swarthmore.

“Today,” the statement goes on, “Phi Psi is proud to be an open and safe social space for anyone in the community.”

Protesters, who entered the building Saturday afternoon, have brought mattresses and sleeping bags into the fraternity’s party room and have pitched tents in the yard.

They are asking the college to immediately end leases with the school’s fraternities and allocate their buildings to groups that have been historically marginalized, like students with disabilities, black students and transgender students.

This week is the last week of classes at Swarthmore. Between class assignments, demonstrators have been singing protest songs in the fraternity yard. One of their signs reads: “This house is ours.”

In an email, a spokeswoman for the school, Alisa Giardinelli, said that Swarthmore has been involved in a larger discussion about the role of Greek life on campus, and that Smith had charged a task force with examining fraternity activity last fall. That task force is expected to deliver its recommendations to her Friday.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/us/swarthmore-college-phi-psi-fraternities.html" id="db209468-eefe-319b-ae80-02490d14861d">The New York Times</a>.

The fraternity brothers wrote of acquiring date-rape drugs and bragged about their “rape attic.” They wrote of sexual encounters with underage girls and suggested getting group tank tops that read, “We don’t drink during the day, we BLACK OUT.”

Swarthmore Students Demand Closing of Fraternity That Boasted of 'Rape Attic'

The documents, published by The Phoenix and Voices, both student-run publications, read like a series of meeting minutes between fraternity brothers and appear to chronicle life at Phi Psi between 2010 and 2016. This means many of the people mentioned in them have since graduated. But students say they are representative of the current atmosphere.

Twenty years after two students attacked Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killing 12 of their peers and one teacher and marking the beginning of an era of school threats and mass shootings, Columbine’s survivors are now parents.

On Saturday, the anniversary of the attack, many of those survivors returned to the school, walking its hallways with their children before heading to a memorial in a nearby park. The faces of their dead classmates flashed on a video screen as armed deputies stood by and the sun fell behind the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

For survivors, it was both a celebration of their rebirth and a lament of a harsh reality: The violence they experienced could come to their children, too. The events of the past week, including a regionwide search for an armed woman who the authorities said was “infatuated” with the Columbine shooting and “extremely dangerous,” only emphasized that.

“I’m terrified to send my son to high school next year,” said Kari Bryan, 37, who was a senior at Columbine during the attack. She is now a mother of four. “It wasn’t until my kids started school that I realized how much it was affecting me,” she said. On her oldest son’s first day of kindergarten, she sat in her car and cried for hours.

In some ways, much has changed since the shooting at Columbine. Lockdown drills are commonplace in schools across the country. Colorado has employed Safe2Tell, a tip line for reporting possible dangers, and passed laws that require background checks for all gun buyers and that permit the authorities to confiscate firearms from potentially dangerous people. By next year, every elementary school in the Jefferson County public school district, home to Columbine, will have an expert in social and emotional development.

But, nationally, the country has not been able to stop these shootings, as officials struggle to close gaps in mental health care, and as gun defenders and gun control advocates fight over appropriate prevention measures. Many in Colorado thought the Columbine attack would be remembered as a uniquely horrifying moment, never to be repeated. Instead, they have watched similar attacks play out again and again. On several occasions, new perpetrators appear to have found inspiration in the 1999 shooting.

Every time there is a new attack, said Tami Diaz, 36, another survivor, “everything has to reheal — it’s like ripping off a scab.”

At the memorial, hundreds of people crowded the lawn by the school, many of them pushing strollers or carrying children on their shoulders. Some wore T-shirts bearing the image of the columbine, a five-petal plant that is the state flower.

A sign bore the victims’ names: Cassie Bernall. Steven Curnow. Corey DePooter. Kelly Fleming. Matthew Kechter. Daniel Mauser. Danny Rohrbough. Dave Sanders. Rachel Scott. Isaiah Shoels. John Tomlin. Lauren Townsend. Kyle Velasquez.

Onstage, Sean Graves, Class of 2002, described being shot six times during the attack, which led to 49 operations.

He now has a 3-year-old daughter. “I didn’t quite understand what my parents had gone through until I put myself into their shoes,” he said. “It took me having a baby for me to truly understand.”

His friend Patrick Ireland, Class of 2000, then described being shot twice in the head. As far as healing, he told the crowd, “many of us are still working through that process.”

LITTLETON, Colo. — This is where I hid from the gunmen, the survivors told their children. That is where the gunmen entered the school, they added. This is how I escaped.

Julie Turkewitz

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