Jennifer a mum of three small children, is drying off her three-month-year-old baby, after giving him a bath in Three Rocks, in the San Joaquin valley, california. The water she just bathed her son in is contaminated.
The contamination is partly due to agricultural waste in the california aqueduct and a chemical reaction with disinfectants put in the water and very poor local water storage.
As she is drying her son, she talks about how the water smells bad and tastes awful. Three Rocks -el porviner united states
While the KNP Complex fire (started on Sep 9th by lighting ) was still burning on October 23rd Christy Bingham and Kristen Shive -Lead Forest Scientist, The Nature Conservancy
Assisting with the initial assessment of impacts to giant sequoia, and generating estimates of mortality
- Hiked 4 mile into check on the Red mountain grove, accompanied by fire-line escorts for safety and satellite data showing an area of high severity burn they wanted to check on (to evaluate the damage in the area)
One of the biggest concerns scientist have is ,with climate induced hotter drought, fires are killing sequoias at a new and concerning rate. (In the KNP Complex fire, 16 groves were affected estimated mortality for 1330 to 2380 giant sequoias over 4 feet in diameter are recorded to have died).
While hiking, they saw what is considered beneficial fire to Sequioa’s and the forest, with dead trees and undergrowth burnt up, it has opened up the forest floor allowing space for the healthy trees to grow. They saw sequoias with normal burn scars and green crowns that will survive and benefit from the fire. (Sequoias can survive with 90-95% crown scorch ). As they got closer, to the area indicated on the satellite map, they saw high severity fire damage to several large sequoias that had suffered from crown torching where all of their needles had been consumed by fire.
Christy Bingham “”We saw some areas in the grove where fire did good work - consuming fallen logs and needles and making space for the next generation of giants. In other areas it was devastating to see once again, large monarch sequoia trees that had been completely killed by fire - flames that went 150 feet up into the canopy and burned up every living needle on the tree."
Kristen Shrive “ We have been seeing significant increases in not just area burned - but area burned very severely (often called "high severity"), “
where the fire kills all of the foliage in the tree crowns and then die”
Seeing extensive high severity in giant sequoia, where so many monarchs were killed heartbreaking, and even though I have seen many in the last couple of years, its still jarring. These are trees that have lived for millennia, through so many fires, but because we mismanaged our forest by keeping all fire out - and screwed up the climate - we are losing them at alarming rates.
Note -Land managers in the Southern Sierra Nevada are reckoning with the effects of large wildfires including the KNP Complex, which burned mostly within Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and the Windy Fire, which burned mostly on the Sequoia National Forest. Findings from a recently compiled fire response plan estimate that across the footprints of the two fires, between 2,261 and 3,637 large giant sequoias (four feet or more in diameter) have either already been killed by fire or have been so severely burned that they are expected to die within the next three to five years. These losses make up approximately 3-5% of the world’s population of large giant sequoias.
