Tagged With "Camp Fire"
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A Forecast for a Warming World: Learn to Live With Fire [nytimes.com]
By Thomas Fuller and Kendra Pierre-Louis, The New York Times, October 24, 2019 Facing down 600 wildfires in the past three days alone, emergency workers rushed to evacuate tens of thousands of people in Southern California on Thursday as a state utility said one of its major transmission lines broke near the source of the out-of-control Kincade blaze in Northern California. The Kincade fire, the largest this week, tore through steep canyons in the wine country of northern Sonoma County,...
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How a natural disaster led one town to do something about its ACEs, past and future
Tracy Franke, principal of Darrington Elementary School, a K-8 school with 300 students, had heard about CLEAR, and called Dr. Christopher Blodgett, who runs the program, to arrange a visit from Turner. “We were hurting,” says Franke. “Our students and staff needed some tools to get through the trauma.”
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How Parents and Teachers Can Calm Kids' Getty Fire Anxiety [latimes.com]
By Sonali Kohli and Nina Agrawal, Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2019 During this Santa Ana wind season, 12-year-old Nicholas Ladesich tends to go to bed worrying about what might burn overnight. He often has dreams of waking up in his old house that burned down in the Woolsey fire last year. But he awakens instead in the living room of the one-bedroom guest house he shares with his brother and parents. He demands that his mom turn on the news to monitor possible fires while his 15-year-old...
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Hurricane Florence first responders receive free trauma/resilience training
In a webinar offered this morning by Elaine Miller Karas , executive director of the Trauma Resource Institute in Claremont, CA, leaders from several North Carolina ACEs Connection communities affected by flooding and other damage by Hurricane Florence learned more about trauma response and how to better help their communities find resilience. Karas, who was delivering her Community Resiliency Model (CRM) training at Duke University in Durham, NC, offered the free training and provided...
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Hurricane Michael: Children Face Stress Of Upended Lives [health.wusf.usf.edu]
When Tiffany Harris and her two children emerged from their hotel after Hurricane Michael roared past, her 3-year-old son pointed to a sea of fallen trees and shattered buildings. "It's broken. It's broken, Mommy, fix it," she recalls her little boy Amari begging. Harris, who lives with her boyfriend, two children, plus her sister and her four children near Panama City, soon learned their town house was uninhabitable. Everything was a total loss after Michael powered inland across the...
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In California’s wildfires, a looming threat to climate goals (calmatters.org)
Beyond the devastation and personal tragedy of the fires that have ravaged California in recent months, another disaster looms: an alarming uptick in unhealthy air and the sudden release of the carbon dioxide that drives climate change. “The kinds of fires we’re seeing now generate millions of tons of GHG emissions. This is significant,” said Dave Clegern, a spokesman for the state Air Resources Board, a regulatory body. The role of wildfire as a major source of pollution was identified a...
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L.A.'s increasingly hot and dry autumns result in 'these near-apocalyptic fires' (latimes.com)
Autumn has seen excruciatingly little rain, intensely low humidity, record heat and powerful winds that sparked what is so far the second largest wildfire in modern California history. "There is some evidence that the autumn on average in Southern California is going to be drier as the climate warms," UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said. The record warmth in California "is clearly a symptom of climate change," Swain said. "The likelihood of seeing record warmth and record heat waves is...
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Microsoft Wants to Pit AI Against Climate Change (insurancejournal.com)
Microsoft announced earlier this month that the tech giant is broadening its AI for Earth program and committing $50 million over the next five years “to put artificial intelligence technology in the hands of individuals and organizations around the world who are working to protect our planet.” “At Microsoft, we believe artificial intelligence is a game changer,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer wrote in a recent blog announcing the funding . “Our approach as a...
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‘None of us will ever be the same’: Survivors of 2017 Tubbs Fire face long-term trauma [Sacramento Bee]
BY PANCHALAY CHALERMKRAIVUTH pchalermkraivuth@sacbee.com August 3, 2019 Robert “Priest” Morgan hasn’t slept without a cocktail of pills since the night he says God kicked him in the head to wake him up – the night he opened the front door of his Santa Rosa mobile home to see a fire engine, a few people running up and down Sahara Street and screaming. “The sky looked like the Fourth of July,” he said. “The entire park except for my street was an inferno.” It wasn’t Independence Day – it was...
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OUR FUTURE AFTER THE FIRE: NON-PROFIT DONATES $1 MILLION TO HELP FIRST RESPONDERS WITH TRAUMA (Action News)
By Jafet Serrato, Oct 24, 2019, for Action News BUTTE COUNTY, Calif. - The North Valley Community Foundation has been working on choosing where vital grant money should go after the Camp Fire. David Little is the executive vice president of the organization. "We are both giving direct assistance to fire survivors who need it, through our partners on the ground but also giving to agencies who need help in the longer term," Little said. The Butte County Sheriff's Office is one of those...
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Overcoming a Lifetime of Trauma, Then Facing a New One: Wildfire [centerforhealthjournalism.org]
KQED News Monday, November 19, 2018 Sabrina Hanes has faced a lot of trauma in her life, most of it in her childhood. As part of her healing, she moved to a Northern California town called Paradise. There she built strength and community, but that was upended when the Camp Fire tore through Paradise, burning her home and turning her life upside down. I followed Hanes through her daily routine in Paradise last summer, to learn how she’s developed resilience. I then caught up with Hanes after...
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Predicting community resilience and recovery after a disaster [Blogs.CDC.gov]
After 9/11, I was asked by the Baltimore City Health Commissioner to help prepare the city for a radiation terrorism event, because my entire career up until that point had been in radiation-based medical imaging. I didn’t know anything about public health preparedness at the time, but I found it very fulfilling to work with the city health department and other first responders, especially fire and police. Public health preparedness science and research is more than multi-disciplinary, it’s...
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Register now: Free ACEs Connection Webinar on the Human Impact of Climate Change
A year after 85 people died in the wildfire that swept through Paradise, CA, and nearby towns, one of the town’s survivors will talk about how she and others are using resilience practices in their recovery from the trauma. On Wednesday, Nov. 13, Paradise resident Kelly Doty will have a conversation with Elaine Miller-Karas, who developed the Community Resiliency Model (CRM). Doty, who lost her home in the fire, and Miller-Karas will discuss resilience education skills designed to help...
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Rising from the Ashes: How Trauma-Informed Care Nurtures Healing in Rural America [The Rural Monitor]
By Jenn Lukens April 17, 2019 It was late July 2018 when the Mendocino Complex wildfire broke out in rural Lake County, California. It burned more than 450,000 acres and destroyed 280 structures before it was contained. Ana Santana managed to fill some storage bins with sentimental items – her kids’ blankets, pictures, and art projects – before fleeing her home. Santana is the facilitator of the Lake County Children’s Council and Program Director for Healthy Start Youth and Family Services ,...
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Sonoma County Resiliency Collaborative A Practical Approach to Post-Wildlife Resilience and Wellbeing
The traumatic events of the North Bay wildfires affect our emotional and physical health, social functioning, and overall well-being, both as individuals and as a community. Unresolved, they can damage our health and limit our potential to rebuild a strong community. Join diverse Sonoma County leaders and representatives to participate in dynamic workshop where you will practice tools for effectively addressing personal and team stress after the fires, network with peers, and learn about an...
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Sonoma County’s parklands are already showing signs of recovery from fire (sonomanews.com)
Nearly every tree species affected by the Tubbs and Nuns fires has a strategy for returning. Some, such as coast live oak, have thick bark and may still be standing with green canopies hanging over blackened understory in places such as Sonoma Valley Regional Park. Trees in this condition will be helped in the years to come because the competition around their bases is gone. If burned, coast live oak have an amazing ability to sprout from the trunk. This can happen as quickly as two months...
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Sonoma’s Hanna Institute awarded $650k grant [SonomaNews.com]
Consultant Robert K. Macy, Hanna Institute Assistant Director Nick Dalton, and Hanna Institute Interim Director Brian Farragher inside Hanna Boys Center in Sonoma, CA. ______________________ After the October fires, the Community Foundation of Sonoma County co-sponsored a survey of local nonprofit organizations to gauge the effect that the disaster had on the people they serve and their organizational capacity to provide services in response. Throughout the “2018 Wildfire Response Survey,”...
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The Capital Region Climate Readiness Collaborative (CRC) first Quarterly Adaptation Exchange in 2018
The Capital Region Climate Readiness Collaborative (CRC) conducted our first Quarterly Adaptation Exchange in 2018 on how Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and trauma can be a detriment to an individual’s physical, social, and mental health that has lasting effects into adulthood. Climate impacts and an individual’s and/or community’s capacity to respond to trauma with resilience is intrinsically tied to access to a support system, resources, and past traumas. The reality is with Climate...
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Tomorrow's Doctors Will Diagnose the Mental Toll of Climate Change
The Daily Dose, July 22, 2019 by Carly Stern https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/tomorrows-doctors-will-diagnose-the-mental-toll-of-climate-change/95540 First-year medical student Anna Goshua was interviewing an emergency room physician in March to learn more about the job when she heard about a patient who had come all the way from Puerto Rico to that ER in Massachusetts for health care. Hurricane Maria had wiped out all prospects of the patient seeking care at home. A surprised Goshua pored...
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Trial by Fire: MARC Sites Collaborate on Trauma-Informed Disaster Response
By @Anndee Hochman During a December 2017 convening in Philadelphia, several leaders from Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) realized they had more in common than a passion for building resilience in their communities. They all hailed from places that had recently been scorched or flooded by natural disasters: wildfires in California and the Columbia River Gorge, hurricanes in Florida, the lingering residue of 2012’s post-tropical cyclone Sandy in the Northeast.
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UC Berkeley Event: Climate Climate Change: The Defining Health Challenge and Opportunity of the 21st Century
This coming Wednesday, The Lancet Countdown will release its first annual report tracking climate change and health indicators across five key domains (including Mental Health) on November 1 ( live in Berkeley , or via Livestream ). (Report attached below.) All of the speakers could and should be invited to the upcoming California Preparing Individuals for Climate Change Conference. Unfortunately, I am unable to attend. Climate Change: The Defining Health Challenge and Opportunity of the...
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Wildfire Mental Health Collaborative: Help for Those Recovering From The Devastating Fires of 2017 [sonomacountygazette.com]
By Sonoma County Gazette, October 22, 2019 As we reach the second anniversary of the 2017 wildfires, the triggers for those impacted have become more visible: reconstruction challenges, the Camp Fires in Butte County or just a windy night are a few examples. Mental health recovery and resiliency are more important than ever. Our community is really starting to see the long-term effects of wildfire trauma and PTSD on the mental health of our employees, neighbors and customers. Prolonged...
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A place called home: A year after the Tubbs Fire, displaced families can finally look ahead [SF Chronicle]
About this series: One year ago, more than a dozen fires shot to life in the North Bay. One of them, the Tubbs Fire, would become the most destructive wildfire in California history. In the year since, The Chronicle’s Lizzie Johnson has spent hundreds of hours with two couples to report this series, witnessing some of the most intimate, heartbreaking and joyous moments as they rebuilt their lives California was on fire again. Through this past summer, blazes raged across the state. They...
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After the wildfire: treating the mental health crisis triggered by climate change
Note from ITRC Coordinator Bob Doppelt: This story illustrates exactly why we organized the ITRC. Post trauma treatment is completely insufficient to address the traumas that lie ahead as temperatures rise. Prevention , by building widespread capacity for Transformational Resilience for all types of climate impacts--is the ONLY viable solution. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In 2017, thousands of homes in Santa...
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As California Fire Seasons Worsen, First Responders And Their Loved Ones Navigate Difficult Terrain (capradio.org)
As California fire seasons worsen, organizations serving first responders are trying to spread the word about the need for mental health services. And they’re encouraging family members and loved ones of firefighters to seek help, too. “It’s that vicarious trauma,” said Cal Fire Battalion Chief Nikole Schutz, speaking during last year's Camp Fire. “Seeing things on social media or being exposed to it all the time, knowing they’re gone for a length of time, just those exposures or the...
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California Blazes Are Part of a Larger and Hotter Picture, Fire Researchers Say (kqed.org)
The speed and ferocity of the wildfires raging through Northern California's wine country have caught many residents off guard and left state officials scrambling to contain the flames. But for fire researchers, these devastating blazes are part of a much larger pattern unfolding across the Western United States. So far this year, fires in the U.S. have consumed more than 8.5 million acres - an area bigger than the state of Maryland. The cause is hot, dry conditions nationwide. Heat records...
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Climate Anxiety
I worked on David Attenborough’s documentary. The grim reality gave me climate anxiety Liv Grant For the BBC’s Climate Change: The Facts, I met those living on the frontline. I struggled to cope with what I learned Sun 28 Apr 2019 11.56 EDT Last modified on Mon 29 Apr 2019 06.42 EDT W e live in a time of loss. Wild places dwindle, the animals and plants that live in them disappear. Climate change is now a certainty, and it will without a doubt lead to the loss of land, species, and ways of...
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Community After Disaster, a Therapist’s Musings
Here in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties, the entire community experienced prolonged and extensive hyper-arousal – days on end of watching and wondering where the fires would burn next, and far too many sleepless nights. According to the literature on disasters, what follows is a brief honeymoon period, characterized by community cohesion and gratitude. Sonoma County showed up for each other in major ways in the past couple of weeks, and the outpouring of gratitude to the first responders...
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Editorial: Inmates Risking Their Lives to Fight California's Wildfires Deserve a Chance at Full-Time Jobs [latimes.com]
By The Times Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2019 As California continues to burn, the state’s firefighters have spent day after day in the searing heat and ferocious wind, hiking toward the flames, cutting fire lines and protecting homes. It’s grueling, heroic work that saves lives and prevents more devastation. And sometimes, it’s done by prison inmates. Among the thousands of federal, state and local firefighters on the fire lines, there are also more than 2,500 prisoners...
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Elaine Miller-Karas Helps Bring the Dalai Lama's Vision to Light
Elaine Miller-Karas, executive director and co-founder of the Trauma Resource Institute, has been invited to attend the launch in New Delhi, India, of a special program initiated by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Miller-Karas is one of the key developers of the Trauma Resiliency Model® (TRM) and the Community Resiliency Model® (CRM) – biological-based models designed to help people recover from toxic stress. Miller-Karas has shepherded the Trauma Resource Institute since its birth in 2006 into...
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For wildfire survivors, mental health can be a struggle [Sacramento Bee]
Read entire article by Michelle Simon from Sacramento Bee . Klyda Flanders held a stuffed toy monkey to her chest with one hand as she lay on a cot in an evacuation shelter in Gridley, near the town of Paradise. Her other hand was held by a Red Cross volunteer, Michelle Maki, who knelt by Flanders’ bed. Maki nodded as Flanders talked about fleeing her home in Paradise and the uncertainty of not knowing what lies ahead now that her old life is in ash. “You cannot imagine what it’s like, and...
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Gov. Jerry Brown says world must fight climate change in visit to Ventura County’s Thomas fire (sbsun.com)
Gov. Jerry Brown warned that the state’s fire seasons will continue to get longer and more volatile, and called for a global fight against climate change after visiting devastated parts of Ventura County on Saturday morning. “This is the new normal,” Brown said, in a news conference after his tour. “We’re facing a new reality where fires threaten peoples’ lives, their properties, their neighborhoods and cost billions and billions of dollars. We have to have the resources to combat the fires,...
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Homeless students, destroyed campuses, ‘invisible injuries’: What California schools learned from recent disasters [edsource.org]
California schools ravaged by fire, floods and mud this year have mostly re-opened and are diving in to a new semester, but district leaders say they’ve learned some crucial lessons about handling natural disasters that all schools could benefit from. “A disaster could happen anywhere at any time in California,” said Steven Herrington, superintendent of the Sonoma County Office of Education, where two public schools were destroyed, nearly a dozen schools were damaged and hundreds of students...
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The Recurring Trauma of California’s Wildfires [The New Yorker]
When Laurie Noble was growing up, in Fort Bragg, California, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, her family’s home doubled as a government weather station. The house was equipped with rain and wind-speed gauges, thermometers, a barometer, and a recording barograph, and the family belonged to a network of part-time observers paid by the federal Weather Bureau, the forerunner of the National Weather Service, to fill in gaps between its professionally staffed stations. By the time Noble was a...
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Even when the smoke clears, schools find student trauma can linger (Lake County Record Bee)
By Carolyn Jones, September 29, 2020, Lake County Record Bee. Schools can serve as a hub for an entire community after a disaster, experts say For some students, the fire is only the beginning. The nightmares, the grief and an all-consuming dread can persist for months or even years. That’s what teachers and school employees have observed among students in California’s fire-ravaged areas, especially Sonoma and Butte counties, where deadly wildfires have struck repeatedly in recent years.
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The Long-Lasting Mental Health Effects of Wildfires [outsideonline.com]
By Jane C. Hu, Outside Online, December 3, 2020 When Aimee Gray woke up on a Sunday morning in October 2017, she decided she was finally going to get a new pair of shoes. She’d worn holes in her favorite Skechers, so when she and her husband headed into town for groceries, she stopped in the shoe store and treated herself to two new pairs. As they drove back to the home they rented on Bennett Ridge Road, in the hills southeast of Santa Rosa, California, her husband remarked on the strange,...
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Please Read This Article: Preparing for Climate Overshoot Requires Quickly Expanding Our Mental Health System
All mental health and social service leaders are urged to read the attached article Preparing for Climate Overshoot Requires Quickly Expanding Our Mental Health System . It describes: How this decade or early next global temperatures will likely surpass the 2.7 F temperature threshold that unleashes extremely destructive and possibly irreversible impacts on the planet and society (climate scientists call this "climate overshoot") How, if we remain unprepared, the climate overshoot will...
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How Do Children Impacted By Wildfires Recover? A Resilient Community’s Trauma-Informed Story Of Healing
Editor’s Note: Do you have a story of a local community creating programs to help their members recover from climate change disasters? Send us your story of a resilient community to editor@kindredmedia.org. We’re honored to feature Thrive , a healing initiative of the North Valley Community Foundation (NVCF), a collaboration of people, organizations and agencies in Butte County, California, whose mission is to address the impact of trauma across generations. In the wake of the devastating...
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Opinion: The Climate Emergency Calls for a New Approach to Mental Health [undark.org]
By Bob Doppelt, Undark, June 24, 2021 I T WAS 80 DEGREES outside in Oregon’s Southern Willamette Valley, the record drought continued, and a red flag warning had been issued to alert residents to beware of wildfires. No, it was not autumn, when wildfire season has historically occurred in the region. It was April 16, when it should have still been cool and pouring rain outside. The surprising wildfire warning seemed to have everyone on edge, fearful about what might happen to them, their...
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For Climate Solutions, Listen to Indigenous Women (yesmagazine.org)
I have always been afraid to talk about climate change. The barrage of doomsday numbers and the overwhelming magnitude of the problem leave me feeling small and powerless. But in the run up to COP26 , the most important climate change meeting in history, running away from the world’s toughest problem was no longer an option. So, as an audio journalist and podcast producer, I instead tried to imagine what a different approach to the discussion around climate change could sound like. So I...
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Natural Disasters are Traumatic: Urge Congress to Support Three Bills to Help Communities Heal
On September 18th, Hurricane Fiona made landfall on Puerto Rico, bringing massive rainfall, killing more than 30 people, and leaving 1.18 million people without power. Ten days later, Hurricane Ian hit Florida, killing over 100 people and displacing thousands whose homes were destroyed. The Mosquito Fire, which began in California on September 8th, is still active. So far, it has burned 80 thousand acres of land, evacuating 11,000 people and burning and damaging nearly 100 buildings. In...
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Local To Global Impacts Of A Thawing Arctic with Darcy Peter and Dr. Susan Natali
Dr. Sue Natali and Darcy Peter offer different perspectives for what climate change looks like in the Arctic and how this connects with global communities.
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A Northern California tribe works to protect traditions in a warming world (npr.org)
Fallen tree trunks and branches cover a road during the Oak Fire near Midpines, northeast of Mariposa, Calif., on July 23, 2022. David McNew/AFP via Getty Images To read more of Chloe Veltman's article, please click here. The Oak Fire, which burned roughly 20,000 acres west of Yosemite National Park last summer, was devastating to the area's Indigenous tribes — including the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation . The tribe is headquartered in Mariposa, California, a small town in the Sierra Nevada...