Before Los Angeles disaster, forest fires expelled others from California

Christina Welch still remembers how the sky looked the day when a forest fire reached 2 miles (3.2 km) from her home in Santa Rosa, California.

It was the 2017 tubb fire, the most destructive in the history of California at that time. Mrs. Welch’s neighbor woke her in the morning and told her to grab her belongings and leave. When Mrs. Welch opened the door, the ashes fell from the sky and the smoke filled the air.

Then, in 2019, Kincade’s forest fire forced his parents to evacuate for five days.

It was the final impulse for Mrs. Welch. After a friend’s advice, she packed her belongings and led to her new hometown: Duluth, Minnesota.

“It was just the culmination of everything,” said the 42 -year -old man. “There are only so many times that each fall was going to worry about what will catch fire, if I was going to lose a house.”

Mrs. Welch is one of several people who has left California in recent years due to climatic disasters, even before the most destructive forest fires in the history of Los Angeles killed 25 people this month.

Just this week, a new forest fire broke out that moved quickly in Los Angeles County, northwest of the city, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate a region that already wobbles for destruction. Trump said last week that he would soon visit South California to witness fire devastation.

Climate experts say that until now they have not seen the mass migration of the State due to climate change, and it is difficult to estimate the number of people who have left for that reason. However, the population growth rate has continued to decrease since 2000, according to the United States census.

But scientists and demographic experts say that as climate change disasters become more extreme and unpredictable, the number of people who leave the State could increase, leaving some cities not prepared with the task of welcoming new residents .

“There could be this wave of new people who say: ‘Do you know what? California simply will not work for me because this is the third time in five years that I had to close my doors due to the extreme soot and smoke,” he said The Data Science Professor at Michigan, Derek Van Berkel.

“We have to start preparing for those eventualities, because they will become more frequent and extreme.”

Several climate related factors can push the Californians to leave home during the next decade. From 2020 to 2023, forest fires destroyed more than 15,000 structures in California, according to Calfire. At least 12,000 structures in the forest fires of Los Angeles that exploded earlier this year have been lost.

The State also faces other impacts of climate change, including floods. The increase in sea level could put half a million residents of California in flood -prone areas for 2100, according to the state attorney general’s office.

The State also deals with at least two earthquakes on average every year of magnitude 5.5 or more, according to the California conservation department.

As climatic disasters have become more extreme and more frequent, housing insurance rates have also continued to increase. More than 100,000 residents of California have lost their home insurance since 2019, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis.

The data suggest that climatic migration is, so far, more a local phenomenon, and some move inland within their native state or even look for higher land in their own city to avoid flooding, said Jeremy Porter, head of climatic implications With First Street, which performs climate risk modeling.

But, he said, in recent years, a smaller number of people have begun to go to cities outside California that are announced as potential “climatic paradises.”

The term comes from the Climate Adaptation researcher Jesse Keenan, who created a list of places in 2019 that is expected to be less affected by climate change.

Near the top of the list is Duluth, Minnesota, an old industrial city, home of about 90,000 people, a population that has grown slowly since 2020 after years of stagnation.

One of the attractions of the city is its proximity to the great lakes, the series of lakes that comprise the world’s largest fresh water body. About 10% of the US and 30% of Canada are based on the lakes for drinking water.

“In a scenario in which resources have become scarce, this is a tremendous asset,” said Van Berkel.

The water supply of the great lakes attracted Jamie Beck Alexander and his family to Duluth. Alarmed by three consecutive and destructive seasons of forest fires in California, Mrs. Alexander, her husband and two young children joined a truck and led to Minnesota in the country in 2020.

Mrs. Alexander has found similarities between the small and progressive city and its former city of San Francisco.

“There is a real depth of connection between people and deep rooting, the things that I think are important for climatic resilience,” he said.

Mrs. Welch ignored her friends who thought she was crazy for moving to a city known for their snowy records and frozen conditions, with an average of 106 days a year of sub-gospel temperatures. The clear and beautiful city in a hill has become theirs, he said.

“There are many people here who love where they live and want to protect it,” Welch said about Duluth.

Although some cities have adopted their designation as climatic paradises, it is still a challenge for smaller local governments to find resources to plan new residents and climatic resilience, said Van Berkel.

Van Berkel works with Duluth and other cities in the area of ​​large lakes on climate change planning, including welcome to the new residents who move due to climate change.

The city of Duluth refused to respond to the request for BBC comments on how he was preparing to welcome climatic migrants.

For now, Porter said, the region of the great lakes and other cities of “climate refuge” do not see high levels of migration. But if that changed, many would not be ready, he said.

“A great investment in local communities would be needed … For those communities to be able to assume the type of population that indicates part of the climate migration literature,” Porter said.

In the city of Duluth, for example, housing availability can be a problem, said Alexander. She said that although the city has space to create new homes, it currently does not have enough new developments for a growing population. As a result, in the years since he moved there, he said, housing prices have increased.

And any new housing and other developments should also be done taking into account climate change, said Van Berkel.

“We do not want to make false steps that can be very expensive with our infrastructure when we have the climate change that raises its ugly head,” he said.

In 2024, a category 4 hurricane destroyed more than 2,000 homes and businesses in the climate refuge of Kelsey Lahr de Asheville, North Carolina.

He moved there in 2020, attracted to the warm climate scene, restaurant and music of the city, after a series of devastating seasons of forest fires and landslides near his city of Santa Barbara, California.

Before moving, Mrs. Lahr widely investigated the most resistant climate places to live, with Asheville classifying near the top due to its softest temperatures and its interior location, protecting it from floods.

But last year, Hurricane Helene crossed the west of North Carolina, killing more than 100 people in the state and decimating the new hometown of Asheville of Mrs. Lahr. Many were left without energy for almost 20 days and without drinking drinking water for more than a month.

“Clearly, southern Appalachia is not the ‘climate refuge’ that was built to be,” said Lahr.

In Deluth, Mrs. Alexander said her family also quickly learned that they could not escape from climate change.

During its first summer, the city was beaten with the same smoke and poor air quality that moved them away from California, this time from Canadian forest fires.

“It was like, this really deep joke that the universe played me,” he said. “Unless we address the root cause (climate change), we will always feel that we need to collect and move.”

Since then he moved to Wisconsin for personal reasons, but says he does not regret that first walk to Minnesota. Nor Mrs. Lahr regrets moving to Asheville.

Although Mrs. Lahr often loses the ancient forests of the Yosemite National Park in California, where her summers would pass working as rangers, a future that can bring more climatic disasters requires sacrifices, she said.

“I believe more and more than climatic paradises are a myth,” he said. “Everyone has to evaluate the risk where they live and go from there.”