When the August 16 lightning strikes started forking from the sky to the ground in the Bay Area, Sarah Lenz was driving back from the scene of a vehicle accident and fire. It was pitch dark in the 23,000-acre Crystal Springs watershed in San Mateo County where she is a watershed keeper and supervisor, or what you might think of as a water ranger—something like a park ranger but who protecting source watersheds for drinking water not parks.
Lenz’s main responsibility is to be fully present in the watershed when something happens—a first responder to crashes, fires, slides, floods, suicides, and trespassers. Crews coming in from the outside would just take too long to get to such events—opening locked gates, getting lost on branching fire roads, not knowing the lay of the land. “It’s always fun at night when I turn on the lights of the patrol vehicle, you might see a fox,” says Lenz, who just turned 50.
Lenz grew up in the Midwest, where thunderstorms are nothing special, so the flashes of light on the horizon on her drive back to the 100-year-old keeper cottage she now inhabits as part of her job didn’t worry her. But when she got home she only took her boots off. “It started storming, not just flashes but really intense wind gusts and lightning strikes. Just as I was tying my shoelaces again so I could drive to higher ground, Cal-Fire called me to get out of there,” she recalls.
It was 2:00 a.m. Lenz checked the lightning strike map on her phone. “I could see in real time where they were hitting,” she says. She also checked wind speeds and humidity at the Spring Valley weather station. Then she donned her fire retardant Nomax suit and climbed in her patrol truck, which carries a fire pumper and 110 gallons of water. She chose a road to a high spot where she could see what was going on in the watershed.
A few minutes later Lenz changed direction to respond to a radio call about a fire on the golf course. “As I came up from the valley around the crest of the hill there was a wall of fire. I was surprised I didn’t know there was fire sooner, but the mountain just hid it, flames up at the tops of two pine trees. I checked to see if the scene was safe. I drove around the trees to see if the fire was on both sides, but it was only on one. I let dispatch know I was on Sawyer Ridge. Then fired up my pumper, knocked down the flames in the crown of the trees, and kept the fire contained to one side of road,” says Lenz.
Pilarcitos Cottage near the reservoir, where Lenz lives.
Fire response is one thing that hasn’t changed about the job since the first watershed keepers were hired by Spring Valley Water Company in the late 1800s. Early keepers spent a lot of their time shooting “varmints,” ejecting poachers, and stocking lakes with the favorite fish of the water company’s directors, who used the Crystal Springs area for private recreation. The City of San Francisco acquired the company in 1930, as well as more than 38,000 acres of East Bay watersheds. Since then, keepers have been tasked with everything from checking dams and opening valves to guiding firefighters, police, and more recently Bay Area Ridge Trail hikers into the remote backcountry.
Aiming her hose at the two pine trees this past August, Lenz soon ran out of water and radioed the dispatchers she was heading out for more. “We are responsible for any initial attack on the fires, we know the layout, the roads, where the water sources and fire hose bibs are. We have all this stuff set up strategically for fire-fighting,” she says.
As the night waned, her co-keepers came on duty and began to pitch in, finding four other fires. Two “street engines” from a nearby city responded to the Sawyer Ridge fire, Lenz recalls. Though the trucks were not equipped to navigate dirt roads, Lenz managed to get them to the scene. “We keep our roads in good shape,” she said. Later she brought a Cal-Fire crew to the golf course fire, where they all cut a line with hand tools.
“We had eight lightning strikes in our Peninsula watershed that night, but thanks to Sarah and other keepers and responding fire agencies none of them merged into a big fire like the SCU complex in our East Bay watershed,” says SFPUC’s Natural Resources Director Tim Ramirez. “Our watershed keepers don’t need to run the drinking water system anymore, but they do need to live on the property and patrol it—eyes and boots on the ground.”
In his last 15 years overseeing the watersheds, Ramirez has expanded keeper roles to embrace more typical park ranger roles, such as working with trail docents and sharing natural history with visitors. But it’s their finely-tuned sense of the local landscape and conditions that remains most valuable of all.
“Watching the ridge of the coast range, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between smoke and fog around here,” says Lenz.
After the August fires burned through so much of California, her department made some changes. “Two weeks later there was another lightning event forecast, and this time we were more pro-active. We staffed people through the night; we put float tanks out in the lake to supply water to water tender trucks; we tested all our fire hose systems; I kept my fire gloves on the dash and my Nomax right behind me in the seat. It’s a little intense living right in the middle of the forest in fire season.”
Lenz put away her Nomax after the November rains. When winter storms hit the watershed, she’ll be on the lookout for flash floods and downed trees: eyes and ears on the ground year-round.
Top photo: Lightning strike this August on the Peninsula watershed. All photos: SFPUC
Ariel Rubissow Okamoto is both today’s editor-in-chief and the founding editor of ESTUARY magazine (1992-2001). She enjoys writing in-depth, silo-crossing stories about water, restoration, and science. She’s a co-author of a Natural History of San Francisco Bay (UC Press 2011), frequent contributor of climate change stories to Bay Nature magazine, and occasional essayist for publications like the San Francisco Chronicle (see her Portfolio here). In other lives, she has been a vintner, soccer mom, and waitress. She lives in San Francisco close to the Bay with her architect husband Paul Okamoto.
Our magazine’s media motto for many years has been “Where there’s an estuary, there’s a crowd.” The San Francisco Estuary is a place where people, wildlife, and commerce congregate, and where watersheds, rivers and the ocean meet and mix, creating a place of unusual diversity. In choosing to tell the...
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Hothouse Earth
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Photo by Megan Nguyen
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
4th California Climate Change Assessment Blues
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.