Climate change came for my family in California this week

My Pasadena aunty Susan has always had a thing for shoes. She ferrets out styles that strike that elusive balance between comfort and cool. And when she scores a particularly fine pair, she often snaps a photo and sends it my way. On Wednesday morning, as the Santa Ana winds were whipping up wildfires in the Los Angeles region, she was faced with a dilemma. When you are preparing to evacuate, which pairs do you take? 

Her most prized possessions, a series of black and white photographs shot of the family long ago, have all been copied and live on the cloud. And her important documents, like her passport and laptop, of course, were already packed. The dog and his accoutrements were also set aside for travel. 

But her shoes? Their fate was still undecided. “You can’t imagine how stressful this is,” she told me as she bustled through her tiny bungalow and then rushed me off the phone so she could keep packing. My uncle Frank, who is older and lives with a severe form of Parkinson’s, had already been evacuated from his care home in Altadena. A fire had started on the hills above and was being pushed south by winds that, as I write, show no signs of letting up. He and his fellow residents are currently parked at the Pasadena Convention Centre which, for now, is out of harm's way.

 It’s easy, living in a large urban centre, to develop a false sense of imperviousness to disasters caused by extreme weather events. We tend to have faith that sewer systems will be robust enough to handle any amount of rain. We tend to trust that fire fighting capability in cities will be fast and responsive enough to douse a flame before it explodes. But as the weather gets more extreme, we see weather-related catastrophes do not strike only in remote areas.

Rather than waiting for a potential gridlocked exodus out of Pasadena, Susan, my cousin Conrad and his fiance Alice, and their four dogs voluntarily left for a safe place at a friend’s house in Palm Springs. “It might be a bit insane but safe,” she texted.

On visits long ago, I enjoyed soaking up the warmth of what seemed like Pasadena’s perfect climate. I’d complain if the weather had the temerity to rain while I was there, thinking what bad luck it was to miss the heat on my holiday. But as the California climate has warmed and droughts become more frequent, rain is now celebrated. And on my most recent visit, the relentless sun, paucity of rain, and the dusty hills framing the city have seemed more ominous than welcoming. Now, that fire threat has materialized with an unprecedented fury.

California, once considered North America’s climate paradise, has always had fires. But climate change and global warming has rendered them ever more destructive. Most of the megafires have struck in forested areas, outside of urban areas. But after last summer, when the state  withered under the hottest July on record and followed by a dry winter, even urban areas are parched and vulnerable. 

And so it is that climate change has come for my family. Sure, I lived through Vancouver’s 2021 atmospheric river. But for me, that meant sitting under a roof that thankfully didn’t leak and remarking on the force of the rain. I also sweated through the heat dome that hit the same summer. But truthfully, sleeping in the basement for a couple of nights was a mere inconvenience. Others, of course, were not so lucky. More than 600 people died during that heat wave. 

Today, as I listened to the fear in my aunt’s voice, I was reminded of the voices of so many people who have shared their experiences with fire for Canada’s National Observer. The choices are similar, the anxiety universal. We are all in this together.