Weekly Topic: In depth: California Wildfires
Lauren Bernstein

Camp and Woolsey Fires contained; months of recovery ahead

California residents received hopeful news during the Thanksgiving week: officials declared the Woolsey Fire in southern California and the Camp Fire in northern California 100% contained. While this is welcome news after more than two weeks of devastation, some areas are still under mandatory evacuation, families remain in shelters, and many residents have returned to their neighborhoods to find their homes incinerated.

The Woolsey Fire burned over 96,000 acres in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, destroying over 1,500 structures and killing three people. According to California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the Camp Fire’s death toll reached 88 people, becoming the deadliest and most destructive fire in California’s history. The fire burned more than 153,000 acres, destroying nearly 14,000 homes and over 4,500 other structures.

While this containment might mean less fodder for media headlines, the post-containment issues for California residents, firefighters, and relief crews are vast and potentially chronic. Search and rescue teams predict months of recovery efforts in the affected communities. Over 200 people are still unaccounted for in northern California, thousands of animals have been displaced, thousands of residents have applied for housing assistance, and questions about the longer term health and environmental impacts of the fires do not have clear answers.

NPR
California Department of Forestry

Farm workers continued to work despite harmful conditions

Low-income and minority communities suffer disproportionately during environmental disasters due to a combination of factors involving the geographic location of low-income neighborhoods, insufficient financial insulation to support evacuation and sheltering, and an inability to take unpaid work leave. These vulnerable populations include migrant farm workers who cannot afford to stop working, even if advised to do so.

Last year’s Thomas Fire and this year’s Woolsey and Hill Fires affected Ventura County, which employs 36,000 farm workers. Many of these workers contribute to the region’s $2.3 billion strawberry industry and at least 20,000 experience a language barrier, making them vulnerable to labor abuses when they are unable to communicate their rights. Thousands of workers stayed behind to pick strawberries during each of these fires, despite the county’s health emergency declaration and warnings of dangerous air quality during the most recent two.

For the majority of these laborers, staying home from work is not a feasible option because they cannot claim disaster relief as undocumented immigrants and they fear losing their jobs if they are not working. They also cannot afford it; for each day they are not in the fields, they lose their minimum $11/day wage. Organizations that serve California migrant workers both advocate for these workers’ rights and fundraise for disaster-associated job loss, but the problem is often more complex than temporary assistance.

NPR
SCPR

Farm worker health and safety challenges the employer, too

California labor laws require employers to both evaluate whether environmental conditions are too hazardous for farm workers and provide appropriate protection from illness and death. During the wildfires, the California Strawberry Commission, Farm Bureau of Ventura County, and Cal/OSHA advised strawberry growers of the risk associated with poor air quality and recommended that employers distribute face masks or halt their farm operations.

This creates a challenging, time-sensitive scenario for the growers. If they choose to halt operation, they risk losing their harvest to ash damage. If they choose to continue operations during difficult outdoor work conditions, they risk worker health. Often, the result is an inadequate compromise of speeding up productivity to harvest crops before they are damaged, and poorly translated health and safety recommendations for workers who do not understand or trust them. During the Thomas, Woolsey, and Hill Fires, some farms sent workers home and monitored air quality hourly, while others shortened the day’s work hours and provided face masks.

Companies are not only required to provide respirator face masks (i.e. N95 masks that filter particulate matter) at certain air quality indices, but they are also required to train their employees on their correct use. Masks were poorly distributed during the Thomas Fire, but improved during this month’s fires. Despite this improvement, many employers provided inappropriate masks. Or, if employers distributed the correct masks, workers were unsure if they were allowed to use them, resorting to makeshift face masks, such as bandanas, which do not adequately filter smoke and particulate matter.

News Update

CDC narrows investigation of E. coli outbreak associated with romaine lettuce to California

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided an update for the ongoing investigation of E. coli linked to romaine lettuce. Although officials have not yet determined a common source, they have narrowed the investigation to romaine lettuce grown in the Central Coastal growing regions in northern and central California. CDC now advises retailers and consumers to only discard products that are known to have been harvested from these regions. Currently, the outbreak has been linked to 43 illnesses in 12 U.S. states.

​CDC

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Lauren Bernstein

Lauren Bernstein

Lauren received her BS in Animal Science from the University of Tennessee. Following a Rotary International site visit to South Africa as an undergraduate student, she decided to focus her prospective veterinary career on public health, specifically on issues involving diseases at the human-animal-environment interface. She completed her veterinary education at the University College Dublin, School of Veterinary Medicine. When she's not in the office, she enjoys yoga, embracing the outdoor activities in Minneapolis, and finding excuses to talk about her rescue cat.