The ridge of high pressure responsible for hot and dry weather across California will stomp out the sea breeze Thursday, and Bay Area residents can expect temperatures to climb up to 20 degrees above average for October. Without the natural A.C., Thursday will be the hottest day so far this season for San Francisco, with highs in the 90s expected at the city’s official weather station.

Daytime temperatures are expected to soar to the lower 80s on the west side and upper 80s east of Sutro Tower. There is a good chance that hot winds from the northeast will promote a few 90-degree hot spots in and around the downtown area Thursday afternoon.

Baron/Lynx

Sizzling microclimates

The National Weather Service issued a heat advisory for residents along San Francisco Bay, in the South Bay and the Santa Cruz Mountains from 11 a.m. Thursday to 11 p.m. Friday.

Dry winds and ample sunshine will allow an urban heat island effect to take hold in San Francisco’s neighborhoods east of Sutro Tower, raising temperatures past the 90-degree mark in parts of downtown. Residents closer to the Embarcadero, Presidio and North Beach can look for temperatures closer to the upper 80s.

Thursday afternoon’s temperatures will range from the upper 80s to lower 90s, with pockets of 90-degree temperatures possible west of the Oakland and Berkeley hills thanks to sunshine and dry winds.

Baron/Lynx

The hottest weather in the region will be found Thursday afternoon in the East Bay. Hot winds are expected to spill into Oakland and Berkeley over the course of the day, raising temperatures to 90 by the afternoon. Inland residents in the Tri-Valley area can expect high temperatures in the lower to mid-90s. 

Residents in cities like San Francisco and Oakland can expect some heat risk, where temperatures over 85 degrees don’t typically occur. This means the unusually hot weather could raise the potential for heat-related illnesses, so it’s best to avoid working outdoors and to seek shade whenever possible. 

Coastal impacts 

Residents planning to escape the hot weather by visiting Highway 1 beaches Thursday afternoon will find that the heat followed them to the coast. Weather models predict today’s hot and dry winds will reach Highway 1 beaches like Marshall’s, Pacifica and Mavericks. Expect plenty of sunshine and afternoon temperatures in the upper 70s to lower 80s, with a few mid-80s possible at bay shore beaches in Alameda, Albany and Sausalito.

All in all, it’s shaping up to be a scorcher along the bay shore. These conditions are expected to continue through Saturday, so stay tuned for updates to the forecast.

Thursday breakdown

San Francisco: A hot and sunny morning is on tap for San Franciscans, with temperatures climbing from the 60s at sunrise to the 80s by noon on the west side. A faint sea breeze will help keep temperatures in the mid-80s at Ocean Beach, Lake Merced and the Presidio. Residents taking Muni from West Portal to downtown can expect a sharp uptick in temperatures — to the lower 90s in Castro, the Mission, SoMa and the Tenderloin.

After sunset, expect cooler winds by the water and nighttime lows in the lower 60s. Residents in Twin Peaks and Diamond Heights will likely experience lows in the mid-60s.

East Bay: Residents taking the ferry out of Jack London Square and Alameda Island can expect a dramatic temperature swing between the morning and evening commute, with temperatures jumping from the 60s at sunrise to the upper 80s by rush hour. Sunny skies will remain over the Oakland and Berkeley hills as temperatures along the I-80 and I-880 corridors reach the upper 80s to lower 90s.  

Inland residents east of the Caldecott Tunnel can look for sunshine and highs in the lower to mid-90s. Hotter temperatures in the upper 90s are possible around Danville, Livermore and Pittsburg. 

Light, cool winds will slowly return in the evening. Look for nighttime lows in the mid-60s, with upper 60s likely in the foothills and around Mount Diablo.

North Bay: Hot and dry weather returns to the inland valleys. Residents in Petaluma, Napa and Santa Rosa can look for daytime highs in the lower to mid-90s. What’s left of the sea breeze will keep temperatures closer to the mid-80s in bay shore cities like Sausalito, Vallejo and San Rafael, while upper 80s set up shop at Mount Tam and in Mill Valley.

Commuters headed to Sacramento this evening can expect scorching temperatures reaching the upper 90s along the I-80 corridor east of Cordelia, including in Fairfield and Vacaville.

Expect clear skies after sunset and nighttime lows in the mid-60s by the water and upper 60s inland, along with a few lower 70s at summits in the Mayacamas and Sonoma County mountains.

Pacific Coast and Peninsula: Temperatures will approach the mid-80s along Highway 1, including in Pacifica, Half Moon Bay and Daly City. Upper 80s are on tap for residents along the San Bruno Gap and the I-280 and Highway 1 corridors this afternoon.

Cooler air returns in the evening, and nighttime temperatures are expected to fall to the mid-60s, though a few upper 60s are possible in the foothills near Redwood City and Palo Alto.

South Bay and Santa Cruz: Clear skies and dry northeast winds are expected to raise daytime temperatures to the lower to mid-90s in the Cupertino Hills and Santa Cruz Mountains. Highs in downtown San Jose and along the Highway 101 corridor between Morgan Hill and Gilroy will also surpass the 90-degree mark, with a few upper 90s possible in East San Jose and Milpitas.

The sea breeze will help moderate temperatures along Monterey Bay, but daytime highs and dry winds around Watsonville and Santa Cruz will help raise temperatures on the shore to the lower 80s, with a few mid-80s possible at beaches near Capitola and La Selva.

After sunset, expect nighttime temperatures in the mid-60s by the water and upper 60s to lower 70s inland.

Reach Gerry Díaz: gerry.diaz@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @geravitywave

The post San Francisco’s hottest day of the yr appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

A year ago, in the middle of the night, crashes of thunderbolts shook millions of people in the San Francisco Bay Area out of their sleep. They didn’t know history was about to happen.

A storm swept over a region baking under record heat and dryness. Instead of rain, though, the storm sent thousands of lightning strikes, and by the time the sun came up, hundreds of wildfires crackled in the hills. They would combine into four major fires and consume more wildland than any event in state history, destroying over 4,000 structures and killing seven people.

Amid the devastation, one blaze left an extraordinary mark.

The CZU Lightning Complex, as it would come to be known, had immediate consequences, burning down almost 1,500 buildings, forcing the evacuation of 77,000 people and killing a 73-year-old recluse named Tad Jones. One citizen of the forest will feel the effects for ages. The fire delivered a scorching blow to a shaggy and mysterious tree called the coast redwood. The world’s tallest living thing — and one of the biggest — the coast redwood is also spectacularly old, with many specimens born before Jesus Christ.

The CZU fire complex burned more of these trees than have ever been burned, in a fire hotter than ever known among coast redwoods. How this tragedy came to be is a tale of how heat, mismanagement and climate change are transforming the West. On a swiftly changing planet, it raises questions about whether the oldest and toughest things can survive.

This is the story of that fire.

The mountains

Cal Fire’s Dan Bonfante stands at the base of the Mother of the Forest, one of the famous redwoods damaged in the CZU Lightning Complex. | Courtesy of Dan Bonfante

For most of his life, Dan Bonfante has fought fires in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

He started at 17 as a fire department volunteer. Now 37, with black sideburns and a broad mustache, he’s a battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as Cal Fire. A heavy-equipment specialist, he runs bulldozers around fire hot spots.

He grew up here, in a fog-drenched town near the coast called Felton, and loves it too much to leave. As a kid, he would play on a half-acre by the creek and at the base of a most unusual backyard tree.

The bark was red. It cloaked the tree in great jagged plates, as if whittled by a cosmic knife, but under his hand it felt soft and a little fuzzy.

The tree was also tremendously thick, several yards in diameter, and ramrod straight, as if someone had placed the column of a European cathedral in a California backyard. It was so tall, the young Bonfante had to crane his neck to even see the branches. He wondered how the firefighters would ever rescue him if he got caught up there. And though he couldn’t yet grasp it, the tree had been there a very long time. Bonfante now estimates that the tree is in late middle age, at least 1,500 years old, meaning it sprouted in this misty patch about the time the Roman Empire fell.

The tree is a coast redwood, and it defines the mountains.

Felton is one of the small towns that lie between the beach town of Santa Cruz, with its hippies and surfers, and the inland empire of Silicon Valley, with its coders and capitalists. Steep and windy roads connect towns like Ben Lomond and Bonny Doon, named by nostalgic Scottish immigrants who came to fell these prize trees before the Civil War. The entire human population, unified by the woods, numbers only a few ten thousand.

The mountains experience a soggier version of Northern California’s Mediterranean climate. The winters are cool and send downpours. The summer days in a redwood grove can be as crisp and blue-skied as anywhere in the Golden State — unless the fog is on the march.

Redwoods peek through the fog. | Courtesy of Emily Burns

The Pacific Ocean, which laps at the foot of the mountains, manufactures heaps of fog. It begins offshore in the deep ocean canyons. The water down there is frigid but, like any beachgoer, is beckoned by the California sun. It wells to the surface, and the wind pushes it landward. They tumble together, the cold water and warmer wind and sun and salt, and by the time the combination reaches the beach, it has clouded into a thick white meringue. The fog blots out the sun, plunging the thermometer and scattering the sunbathers.

The fog continues to climb. It surges into the mountain canyons laden with moisture. The droplets festoon the ferns in the creek beds, cover the knobby roots in moss, make the forest floor glisten where yellow slugs slide. This is cloud forest, dripping and primeval.

A banana slug crawls along the thick forest duff in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. The creature is found only on the damp Pacific coast from Alaska to California. | California State Parks

And through the whiteness looms the trunk of a coast redwood, absurdly red and fat. Some specimens reach over 350 feet tall. It is the second thickest tree, second only to its cousin the giant sequoia, which lives farther inland in the Sierra Nevada. An elder is around 2,500 years old. The coast redwood exists only where misty mountain adjoins deep cold sea, in a thin band from central California to the Oregon border.

Any schoolchild knows that trees drink from their roots. The coast redwood is one of a few that also sip from their tips. Its short and dense needles snare the droplets and drink them. Then, when the sun breaks out, a different job: The thick shanks reach for every photon of light, creating a profound shade on the forest floor.

“You look up and the branches have fingered together,” Bonfante says admiringly, “and you can’t see the sky.”

The thirsty beast has another trick, which scientists think is related to the redwood’s extreme height. It shoves its head into the mist above the lesser trees and gathers droplets like a sponge. Then it deploys them. On a foggy but rainless day, you can walk a dry trail and suddenly find your boots caked in mud.

Look up and it is a coast redwood, creating its own rain.

The storm

Early on the morning of Aug. 16, 2020, a tornadolike downdraft of wind jostled the house and woke Dan Bonfante.

A volatile weather system had arrived under cover of darkness. Far south in Baja California, Tropical Storm Fausto had spun off a plume that now moved over Northern California.

Summers in the Santa Cruz Mountains grow hotter each year, thanks to the worldwide mass burning of fossil fuels that power civilization. The resulting carbon dioxide gets trapped in the atmosphere and heats the Earth’s surface like a greenhouse. When this storm appeared, the heat had been acute for a week. Felton, where Bonfante still lived, reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit that Sunday, and the air was exceptionally dry. Bonfante knew a storm could cool both the forest and the air, reducing the risk of fire. The redwoods reached their needles skyward, waiting.

Instead came lightning.

Sleep evaded Bonfante, who instead watched the sky strobe. When morning broke, he got into his Chevy Silverado pickup and drove to a promontory called Eagle Rock. Climbing to its summit, he saw columns of smoke from five or six small blazes rising into the sky.

Lightning forked over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on Aug. 16, 2020, as the storm passed over Oakland, Calif., across the bay from the Santa Cruz Mountains. | Noah Berger/AP Photo

The ridges and steep valleys are part of CZU, the code name for Bonfante’s unit of Cal Fire. The unit oversees 400,000 acres of mountainous terrain from Santa Cruz, to the south, and north to the border of San Francisco. Bonfante could see but a patch of it. Reports on his radio indicated that lightning strikes had sparked fires everywhere, a stunning 27 in all. Never before had CZU confronted so many blazes at once.

In a typical season, soggy, foggy CZU might see a couple of little flareups of 10 or 15 acres, usually in September or October when things had dried out a bit. CZU staffers were used to Cal Fire colleagues razzing them.

“We were coined as an asbestos unit,” says Nate Armstrong, CZU’s deputy chief, “because it doesn’t burn.”

Rare though they were, the knee-jerk reaction among Bonfante and his colleagues was to stamp such wildfires out, even if they didn’t immediately threaten people’s homes. That’s true everywhere in the West. A wildfire is dangerous, an unpredictable risk to humans and their property, a threat that only increased as Silicon Valley prospered and pushed into the woodlands.

That constant snuffing changed the forest’s character. Studies of tree rings suggest that prior to the arrival of Europeans, mild fires swept across these slopes as often as every four to six years. The spark might have been lightning, or more likely Native Americans, who set fires to flush out prey or encourage new plants to fruit. A typical forest grove was made up of young, short brush and saplings, punctuated by a few ancient redwood columns whose branches were beyond the reach of fire.

When white people arrived, two things changed: They clear-cut the massive redwoods, which now exist in just 5% of their historical range. And when the trees bounced back, the foresters forbade fire.

Today’s Santa Cruz Mountains look very different. The giants are gone, except for the 10,000 acres where the old growth still stands. The redwoods that replaced them are crowded together — most are stunted and small. “Doghair,” loggers call them. Roots tangle for too little water; branches fight for too little light. Fire doesn’t topple the weak. These redwoods don’t soar because no one tree can win.

A huge, old-growth coast redwood at Big Basin Redwoods State Park in 2012. | California State Parks

While CZU’s fires are rare, they are exceptionally hard to put out. The slopes are crowded with thorns and bushes, and the empty air that once stood between brush and the redwood canopy is filled with middling trees. Firefighters call them “ladder fuels.”

“Dense and difficult to penetrate” is how Cal Fire describes the landscape.

A primary difficulty comes from the ground itself. Many swaths of this redwood forest had never, in the memory of anyone living, experienced a wildfire. That fits with the U.S. Forest Service’s approach to forest management, which since its founding in the early 1900s put a premium on suppression. In recent years, Cal Fire, too, continued to fight all fires even as evidence of their necessity to a healthy landscape piled up. Meanwhile, a pileup of a different sort — fallen trees, branches, needles, cones and leaves — accumulated underfoot, thicker each year, untouched by fire, until the forest floor was as springy as a gymnasium mat.

Last August’s heat wave brought dry air, with just 25% humidity, a third of normal. Moisture fled from redwood tips, from the ladder fuels, and even underfoot, where the rot quietly turned into tinder.

The complex

Bonfante spent Sunday at the wheel of his truck, directing Cal Fire staff to nip fires in the bud.

Over 18 years at Cal Fire, he had steadily risen up the ranks, reaching his current station as battalion chief after the 2020 season, while also volunteering for years with the local Felton department. Bonfante has largely played behind-the-scenes roles, capturing attention once in 2019 when a local website reported on an Instagram post he wrote that called for people in Felton to bypass law enforcement and “get the posse together” to find a homeless man accused of assaulting a girl.

“I wasn’t really thinking clearly when I posted it,” Bonfante says now. “Would I do it again? No.”

That Aug. 16, Bonfante’s focus was on flames that menaced homes. Cal Fire managed evacuations from the mountain communities, while keeping a nervous eye on another threat.

To the north, lightning strikes had started three of the largest fires in the CZU. A few hundred acres each, they formed a rough triangle and crackled on in rugged, ridged country, inaccessible by road and far from any town. It seemed likely they would join forces. When several blazes work the same forest, firefighters call it a complex. Multiplication makes the fight harder and raises the risk they will roll into a conflagration.

Dangerous as the trio was, that part of the CZU Lightning Complex would have to wait. Commanders had a critical manpower shortage.

The lightning siege, as firefighters call it, required action on a massive scale beyond CZU’s borders. To the east, the SCU Lightning Complex raced through 393,000 acres, on its way to the record books as the third largest wildfire in state history. The LNU Lightning Complex, in the wine country north of San Francisco, grew to become the fourth largest. Farther north, the August Complex blackened more than 1 million acres, earning the dubious distinction as the state’s largest ever. (This summer’s Dixie Fire has since crashed the record books, becoming the second largest fire, moving some of these blazes down the list.)

Firefighters strive to protect a home in Napa County, Calif., as the LNU Lightning Complex fires burn on Friday, Aug. 21, 2020. | Noah Berger/AP Photo

In mid-August 2020, all these fires burned at the same time, and each deserved to be an all-hands emergency.

Pleas to Cal Fire for reinforcements to CZU’s force — 200 year-round regulars plus 100 seasonal recruits, two bulldozers and 13 fire engines — mostly went unanswered. CZU would have to make do.

By midday on Tuesday, Aug. 18, an exhausted Bonfante headed to a hotel room that Cal Fire had assigned him in Scotts Valley, a town near Felton. Overnight and the prior day, he had led the skeleton crew that contained the Warrenella Fire, a 300-acre blaze to the south. He had not slept for more than 48 hours.

About the same time, the wind made a subtle change. It shifted from northwest to northeast, and began to strengthen.

Bonfante had just gotten out of the shower, thinking of the pillow, when his cellphone went crazy. He hustled out of the hotel room and saw a massive plume of smoke darkening the sky over an area known as Big Basin.

The park

Big Basin is a last stand, both literally and figuratively, for the really old and big redwoods in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is also the cradle of a movement.

The Gold Rush of 1849, which set California on the path to prosperity, was a disaster for the coast redwood. Strong and straight, redwood timber built San Francisco. Resistant to rot, it was the tie of choice for the railroads. By 1884, the region’s sawmills were producing 34 million board feet of redwood lumber a year, and the trees that had stood for millennia were rapidly disappearing.

They might have disappeared entirely if not for a fire.

In 1899, a photographer, Andrew P. Hill, visited Big Basin to take pictures for a story about a redwood fire extinguished with wine from a local vineyard. As he attempted to photograph one of the gargantuan trees, the grove’s owner waved Hill off, saying he intended to convert the forest into railroad ties. The owner demanded the photographer’s negatives.

Hill, disturbed by the experience and the menace to the trees, returned home to San Jose. There he started a group called the Sempervirens Club, dedicated to preserving the remaining redwoods. The club made a startling proposal to the state Legislature: How about setting Big Basin aside as a park?

Members of the Sempervirens Club posed for a photograph during an exploratory trip to Big Basin in 1900. Two years later, the California Legislature made the area into the first state park. | Santa Cruz Public Libraries

It was a cutting-edge idea. In 1902, the California Legislature voted to make Big Basin the state’s first park. Just one year later, President Theodore Roosevelt and naturalist John Muir would camp at Yosemite Valley and lay the foundation for the National Park System. Meanwhile, Big Basin’s original 3,900 acres would grow over time to more than 18,000 acres.

In modern days — until the fire, at least — Big Basin and its rotund red citizens had rewarded Silicon Valley’s laptop wranglers with a singular sort of experience.

They took Highway 9, and beyond Saratoga the road got curvy. The strip malls and subdivisions gave way to pines and oaks. Shade dappled the roadway. Google said to turn right onto State Route 236.

The road got narrower, and curvier, and shadier. Cell signals faded away. Each turn became a hairpin, and the tree shade created a midday twilight. Suddenly, visitors found themselves at the headquarters of Big Basin Redwoods State Park.

The main attraction was the Redwood Loop, a stroll among some of the park’s most massive trees, with names like the Animal Tree, for the forms one could see in the burls, or the Mother of the Forest, which was the park’s tallest tree until a storm lopped off its top a few years ago. But the first things to command a visitor’s attention could be seen from the parking lot. One was the headquarters building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Supported by stout redwood beams, with a redwood shake roof and a stone chimney, it satisfied the archetype of a cabin in the woods. Generations of visitors walked up its steps since it was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1936.

And then there’s the Auto Tree.

Two facts dominate the mind about the Auto Tree: It is unbelievably big, and somehow incomplete. A huge triangle of its trunk is missing. The gap is so big that people used to back their cars into it.

The Auto Tree in Big Basin Redwoods State Park is one of the first marvels that visitors see. | Big Basin Redwoods State Park/Facebook

The void within the tree is black and charred because the Auto Tree survived something dreadful. A fire, or a succession of fires, at some point in the unwritten past ate through the tree’s foot-thick bark, destroyed part of its foundation and consumed its heartwood.

Yet the tree kept growing.

The ridges

The river bottoms and slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains are wet and verdant, but not the ridges.

Rising to altitudes of 2,500 feet, they often stand above the fog. Few redwoods here; instead drier species thrive, like manzanita and knobcone pine, full of resin. On Tuesday, Aug. 18, when the wind shifted and strengthened, the three northern CZU fires merged into one, just as Cal Fire feared. And then, with roaring confidence, the blaze mounted the ridgelines.

Aided by the wind, the fire began an express commute from tree to tree. The combustion of one ignited the next. Embers the size of baseballs broadcast on the wind, starting other spot fires. At Eagle Rock, where Bonfante stood two days earlier, flames leaped 300 feet in the air. A wildfire typically climbs uphill, following the rising air. This fire, however, started chewing its way downhill and into the shady hollows.

On this downward creep, CZU transitioned into something new to history.

In recent decades, as the Bay Area became hotter and drier, a few severe blazes in the Santa Cruz Mountains managed to leap into the redwoods’ lofty crowns. Crown fires are the most intense and fast-moving kinds of fires. But in redwoods, they never spread quickly, or very widely; at least in recent memory, the foggy dampness always broke the fever.

The CZU Lightning Complex Fire grew rapidly from a trio of remote blazes into a conflagration that consumed almost all of Big Basin and much of the Santa Cruz Mountains. | Claudine Hellmuth/E&E News (graphic); Datawrapper (basemap); wildfire.gov (data)

But last August, the fever was high. As the CZU Lightning Complex dropped from the ridges, it climbed the ladder of lesser trees and into the crowns of the giants.

The fireball rolled from one treetop, to the next, to the next. The CZU Lightning Complex became something thought impossible in coast redwoods: a running crown fire. From less than 6,000 acres on Monday, the fire mushroomed to more than 43,000 acres. The biggest inferno ever recorded in the world’s tallest trees raced toward the center of Big Basin on the speed of the wind.

From the other direction drove Dan Bonfante.

The inferno

To Bonfante, the outing was just another assignment. He had worked the Santa Cruz Mountains longer than just about anyone, and his expertise was needed. Cal Fire, realizing the gravity of what was transpiring at CZU, had assembled an elite crew led by outside experts to manage the response. Could Bonfante show them around Big Basin headquarters?

Of course he would. About an hour after sunset on Aug. 18, he headed up Highway 236. The plan was to meet at the visitor center with a strike team leader and three engine crews cutting brush and spraying foam on the park’s structures, including the historic headquarters building.

Then danger closed in, when it was too late for Bonfante to turn back.

His truck’s headlights suddenly met a wall of smoke. He couldn’t decipher the road ahead by more than a few feet. The heat grew intense; the air in the cabin of his truck rose to 120 degrees. He smelled burning plastic, the synthetic parts of his engine turning to vapor. He turned the air conditioner on full blast, which filled the cabin with smoke.

Eyes burning, Bonfante navigated the hairpin turns by sound. If the tires were quiet, he was on road; if he heard crunching, he had veered off. “I honestly didn’t think I would make it out,” he says. “My last rites kind of thing.” Flaming trees and branches littered the road. He four-wheeled over them. The roadside was full of not just flames, but something he had never witnessed at a wildfire: cascades of white sparks.

“It looked like legit sparklers,” he says, “like at a wedding.”

After perhaps a mile and a half of this, he burst through. The approach to headquarters was clear. He made it to the parking lot, which was the safest place for miles. Bonfante staggered out of the cab, threw up, and joined the dozen men on the scene.

Never one to stay in one place for long, though, Bonfante got back in his truck. He wanted to head north, scout how things looked from that direction.

He had driven only a short distance before figures appeared in his headlights. Two people, a man and a woman, and three dogs on leashes. They had walked 4 miles from Last Chance, a community burning to the ground. Bonfante loaded them all into his truck and drove back to the headquarters, where the crew gave them water and Gatorade and turned their attention back to saving the buildings.

And then the fire arrived.

“Suddenly the wind picked up, not sure where from,” Bonfante says. “Every tree that was around us started to torch off.”

It seemed to encroach from all sides, from all levels. The ground fire slowly ate the duff, hypnotically, like lava. Bonfante was used to that. More worrisome were the fully engulfed 250-foot-tall monster trees around them.

Bonfante and the woman hunkered in the cab of his truck, peering out the windshield at the hellscape. “You hear a ting ting ting ting, and it’s firebrands and branches hitting us,” Bonfante recalls. They were being smoked and roasted, but the air conditioning made it cooler than outside. They watched as flames slowly ate the roof of the headquarters building. Inside her shirt, the woman cuddled a white parrot. It didn’t make a sound, and the dogs in another truck didn’t bark. Explosions rippled from the forest, one after another. Trees collapsing.

A video of the Big Basin Fire in 2020. Click on the picture to watch the video. Produced by Mountain Parks Foundation.

Squeals interrupted the background crackling soundtrack. The noise came from the 250-gallon propane tanks that stood by each of the buildings. They sang to release the built-up pressure caused by the tremendous heat, deferring the moment of explosion.

For an hour or two, the trucks paced, driving slowly back and forth across the lot, like hot potatoes shifting from hand to hand. The fire engines sprayed the edges of the parking lot with water, which created slightly cooler pockets. At 3 a.m., a big tree nearby toppled. This was no longer the safest place. They’d have to make a run for it.

Bonfante and the strike team leader stayed in the parking lot with the civilians while the engines forged a path down 236. The crews set their chain saws against burning logs and pushed them out of the way. A route that usually takes 10 minutes to drive took them an hour and a half. But they made it.

When Bonfante arrived at safety with the woman and her parrot, it was close to sunrise. Bonny Doon, a town he knew well, was on fire. He drove there straight away and spent the next 20 hours leading a strike team. He finally stumbled home by noon on Thursday, to his hometown of Felton, which was under an evacuation order but would remain out of reach of the CZU fire complex. He had been awake since the lightning strikes on Sunday morning.

And he slept.

The aftermath

Days passed before anyone not a firefighter dared to enter the fire zone. But that was as long as Nadia Hamey, a local forester who manages San Vicente Redwoods, a conservation property south of Big Basin, was willing to wait.

Animal bodies littered the roadway.

“Furball, furball, carcass,” she says. “All these critters — bobcats, bunnies, wood rats, squirrels, a coyote, snakes, rubber boas, all these things, it seemed, had run into the road on fire, and laid down and died.”

The forest was unrecognizable. The grottoes, formerly under a canopy of leafy shade, were naked under a smoke-orange sun. The ground was white, covered in a layer of ash. Amid the white, the redwoods had turned black.

The charred canopy of coastal redwoods burned a year ago in the CZU Lightning Complex at Big Basin Redwoods State Park. | Nic Coury/AP Photo

Adjoining San Vicente is Swanton Pacific Ranch, a 3,200-acre demonstration forest. Run by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, a state college, it is one of only three centers that study coast redwoods. All of its 40 structures were destroyed, from a historic house dating to the late 1800s to its brand-new conference facility.

The shady groves of redwoods that students had spent years of their lives measuring and observing were transformed.

Many had their bark burned off and the branches amputated. The ground smoked from root fires. The soil was crisscrossed with red veins where embers had baked it to clay. Even the muddy riverbeds — the “dank zone,” as Hamey calls it, where vegetation grows thickest — were blasted with sunlight, stripped to matchsticks and bare dirt. On nearby Swanton Road, on the fire’s western periphery, all that was left of homes were concrete foundations covered in 18 inches of ash.

“The sheer level of heat as it was passing through the stands at incredible speeds was horrific. When you think of redwoods, you think of green, lush, moist. In the course of a day, they had been turned to black, dusty, dry and dangerous,” says Matt Dias, who until last month was the head of the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Dias studied here on his way to his current position. Shortly after the fire, he and other Cal Poly graduates gathered to tour the damage. Like Dias, they had to take moments to stagger off by themselves and grieve.

“As a forester, you feel lost. As a member of the community, you feel lost,” says Dias, who also spent time in the area as a child. “Economic and ecological impact, social impact. Long-term carbon sequestration. You name it, and it all is a loss.”

By the time CZU was contained in late September, it had engulfed 86,000 acres. Within the burn scar lay 97% of Big Basin Redwoods State Park, and virtually all of its 4,400 acres of old-growth redwoods.

At Big Basin, about 100 structures were destroyed. State Route 236 resounds with the buzz of chain saws, felling damaged trees considered dangerous to the public. In May, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) pledged $186 million to fully rebuild Big Basin, with money cobbled together from federal disaster assistance and the state’s general fund. The park is closed indefinitely. Only the chimney of the headquarters building survived, its hearthstones splintered by the heat.

Big Basin’s historic headquarters building, before and after the CZU Lightning Complex. | California State Parks

The rebound

Four months after the havoc, Hamey walked by the banks of Big Creek in the weak December sun to take stock of what comes next.

The forest floor, formerly a teeming mass of blackberries, roses, azaleas and ferns, was bare dirt. But blushes of green could be seen. Little pompoms of fresh shoots erupted from the bases of the madrones and tan oaks. This is how they regenerate after fire.

The redwoods put on the same kind of show, but bigger. New growth was already muscling straight out of the trunks. Some of the younger ones were clad in little green buds their entire height, like fur, or like a bottlebrush. Redwoods are one of the few trees that do this trick, called epicormic sprouting, and it advantages them in the post-fire race for sunlight.

“They’re weirdly adapted to their environment in ways we don’t totally understand,” Hamey said.

Hamey, wearing a torn red flannel shirt and a pink utility vest, stopped and dug a finger into the charred bark of a young redwood. She wanted a glimpse of the cambium, the sleeve between bark and wood where nutrients and water travel. “I can see the brown in here, and that is healthy cambium,” she said. Amazingly, a redwood can survive with just 10% of its cambium intact.

Nadia Hamey digs into a charred redwood in a search for healthy cambium. | David Ferris/E&E News

The other name of the coast redwood is Sequoia sempervirens. The second word in Latin means “evergreen.” Its tactics are legendary. Knock over a redwood and it is not dead. A circle of new redwoods, called a fairy ring, will grow around its wide base. The tree has cloned itself, and Big Basin is full of redwoods formed in rings, starting life in the ruins of death.

Scientists are only beginning to penetrate the genetic mysteries of the coast redwood. Take its chromosomes. Humans have two sets of chromosomes; some plants have three. Coast redwoods have six. Scientists don’t know why, or what the purpose is of the plant’s colossal genome. It is made up of 27 billion base pairs, nine times that of a human. Only one organism on Earth, an endangered Mexican salamander called the axolotl, has more.

A sprout pushes its way through the bark of a burned redwood. The coast redwood is one of few tree species that regenerate this way. | David Ferris/E&E News

The redwood’s capacity for bouncing back from trauma prompts its human caretakers to ask philosophical questions.

“The whole notion of what death is for a redwood is really tough,” says Joanne Kerbavaz, a senior environmental scientist for California State Parks who works at Big Basin. “What’s an individual, and what is dead?”

The response

One year later, some of the damaged red sentinels of the Santa Cruz Mountains still smolder. The fire was declared extinguished in December, but firefighters keep stumbling across smoking redwoods, as embers glow in their dry hearts.

A normal wet winter would have extinguished these slow burns, but this wasn’t a wet winter. Just 20 inches of rain fell, not the usual 60 or 70. The drought continuing to break records from British Columbia to Arizona includes these mountains.

In January, a hundred acres of fires broke out — previously an unthinkable event — and the normal riot of growth that follows a fire is feeble, with herbs and vines historically dry and paused at kneecap height. Nonetheless, most of the surviving redwoods are still sprouting green.

On one hand, the CZU fire complex wiped decades of forest mismanagement off the ledger by burning up the old fuels. On the other, the blackened branches and trunks of last year’s fire are strewn everywhere, charcoal awaiting a spark.

The whole trauma — an epic fire followed by an epic drought — seems to be etching a new outlook into the minds of the forest keepers.

“The main shift that has happened is that we have to change to a living-with-fire mentality,” says Justin Garland, the redwoods program director at the Peninsula Open Space Trust, a nonprofit that acquires land for conservation.

Justin Garland of the Peninsula Open Space Trust examines the stump of an old-growth redwood cut down long ago, and the smaller redwoods that now populate the area. | David Ferris/E&E News

Garland has come to a now common, but still stunning, conclusion: The wet, cool, asbestoslike climate the Santa Cruz Mountains inherited from history is gone.

“There’s going to be fire,” he says. “Every October, there’s going to be red flag warnings from here on out.”

The new reality is prompting a hive of new activity at Swanton Pacific Ranch that will resonate all over California and the West.

In this burnt-out palette, “the research opportunities are abundant,” says Dias of the state forestry board. Researchers from two universities, alongside the U.S. Geological Survey, are studying the soil.

The work is also driven by worry, particularly about catastrophic mud flows. Over the winter, Cal Fire prepared to evacuate whole communities if a big rainstorm caused steep, rootless slopes to give way. The dry winter prevented — or at least delayed — that kind of tragedy. But Swanton is becoming a center for understanding how stable the ground remains after fire sweeps through.

Fog drifts over the barren landscape of Big Basin after the CZU fire. | Nic Coury/AP Photo

Meanwhile, a revolution is underway at agencies like the Forest Service and Cal Fire. Agencies founded on a credo of suppressing fire are coming to the conclusion that the only way to save the forest is to regularly burn it.

But prescribed burns, as they’re known, are tricky. Firefighters wait for a window in the cool season when the wind is light and predictable and the humidity is low. They walk slowly through the woods, dribbling flames from a drip torch, and stand ready to direct the flames. The idea is to use modest fires to clear the understory and avoid infernos. Sensible as it sounds, a prescribed burn makes locals anxious, and politicians too.

But that is changing. After last year’s fire season consumed more than 4 million acres in California, the state and the Forest Service agreed to control fuels, including prescribed burns, on 1 million acres a year. At the federal level, the “Energy Infrastructure Act,” a part of the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure package, includes $500 million over four years to fund prescribed burns.

“The conversation has shifted,” says Dias, the former state forestry official. “I think prescribed fire will become a much more consistent and accepted practice across the state.”

Cal Fire, which oversees prescribed burns on the lands it is responsible for, chose Swanton Pacific Ranch as the center for a new $4 million, four-year project to train firefighters across the state in techniques to subdue forest fuels. Another grant, worth $4.7 million, will plant 55,000 trees at Swanton and another nearby forest, and bring in members of a local Native American tribe, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, to collaborate on fire management.

It is possible that from the ashes of the 2020 California fire season, a new set of practices will emerge, combining ancient knowledge with the latest scientific research, and the forests will eventually enter a new state of balance. It is also possible that no amount of money can fix a century of mismanagement across millions of acres — or that the new climate is so dry that there is no window to safely conduct those burns. In fact, new Forest Service Chief Randy Moore recently restricted burns for the time being in national forests, partially citing the weather conditions.

The question remains: In a climate-changed world where each year gets hotter and hotter, can the coast redwood survive?

“I really struggle with climate change and how it’s going to impact the redwoods. It’s an existential question,” Garland says. “Mother Nature is resilient. It will probably, eventually bounce back, but if we keep — boom boom boom boom! — hitting it with these fires, we lose it. We lose the forest.”

It is too early to tell whether any individual redwood damaged by CZU will pull through. The famous denizens of Big Basin, like the Animal, Auto and Mother trees, have serious damage but also green sprouts. The most likely scenario in a warming world, ecologists say, is the redwoods eventually retreat. They could flee to the river bottoms, or endure on California’s wet and lightly populated north coast while petering out in the south.

The future

Joanne Kerbavaz stands at the base of one of the giant trees on the Redwood Loop in Big Basin Redwoods State Park after the CZU fire. | David Ferris/E&E News

One day in December, Kerbavaz, the Big Basin scientist, stood at the Redwood Loop. Before the fire, it was a broad path where tourists shuffled, necks craned back and mouths agape, under green shadow, taking in the spectacle of the world’s tallest and most stately trees. On this day, it was a wreck — the ground a chaos of fallen branches, the foliage burnt orange as autumn, the ruddy bark charred black, the landscape splashed with sun because the canopy that the redwoods rely on for water and photosynthesis is gone.

But Kerbavaz, a short, brown-haired woman in the khaki shirt and green slacks of a park ranger, seemed unfazed.

“A perturbation like this is not out of the range of the ordinary,” Kerbavaz insisted. “It’s going to take a while for these to come back, but they will come back.”

The evidence is written in the charred center of the Auto Tree and others among the ancients that bear black scars. Severe fire has been here before, and more than once. Across the CZU burn zone, the eye picks out trees that are still green, that somehow evaded the fire’s wrath and stand as if it never happened.

“An ancestor of the redwood was widespread 200 million years ago. A closer ancestor was widespread in the West 50 million years ago. Fifty thousand years ago, coast redwoods were living in Los Angeles and were found in the La Brea tar pits,” Kerbavaz continued. “They are survivors. They were here before the Mediterranean climate got here. They got to California before California had vaguely the climate it has now.”

Kerbavaz’s perspective is echoed by other redwood experts. They know the severity of the CZU fire complex and the inevitable hotter summers to come. Yet they believe the coast redwood is just too tough, too resourceful, to go extinct. The tree’s vast timescale seems to imbue its caretakers with patience. Knowing they are but rabbits, entrusted with the care of a tortoise, seems to fend off doomsday thinking.

Less certain is what happens to the rabbits.

As the forest burns every year, the humans who live near the redwoods will experience heat waves, and evacuations, and blackouts, and droughts, and mudslides, and smoke hanging in the air. Creatures that don’t measure their lives in millennia could find their life spans nastier and shorter.

The shaggy, patient trees that form an unbroken living line from today’s Silicon Valley to the times of the Bible are in ruins. The sprouts bursting from their trunks suggest that the shaded cathedrals could return, though the healing may take so long that no one now alive will see them. Today’s adults will take their children to Big Basin, and to landscapes across the West where once-verdant forests have been withered by fire. They will point and talk, not of the desolation that is, but of the Eden that used to be — and could be again, one distant day.

“In my lifetime, yeah, it’s not going to look like it used to look,” said Kerbavaz with a shrug. “But in the next lifetime, probably.”

The post When the hardest bushes met the most well liked hearth appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Gazing at incredibly unaffordable real estate is a Bay Area pastime, and 2022 didn’t disappoint.

Some of your favorite deals of the year included homes on the National Register of Historic Places, award-winning architecture, and San Francisco’s original Painted Lady.

Below are our seven most read property porn picks of the year. What would you choose?

7. Award-winning gallery home in South Park

South Park’s “Gallery House” by San Francisco’s multi-award-winning architecture firm Ogrydziak Prillinger was a real eye-catcher, designed to house an extensive art collection.

6. Albert Farr’s renovated home in Presidio Heights

Built in the 1930s, this modernized French Normandy mansion embodies the design of old San Francisco with large rooms and luxe touches by Handel Architects followed by Matarozzi Pelsinger.

5. The lush “Petit Trianon” from Presidio Heights (and Decorator Showcase 2019)

This 18,000-square-foot Koshland House, modeled after the 1760s Le Petit Trianon of Chateau Versailles, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.

4. Traditionalist (and ornate) Queen Anne Victorian on Page Street

This traditional residence was built in 1890 and has been owned by the same family for 37 years. She screams “plush”. Almost the entire home is swathed in floor-to-ceiling patterns and colors, stained glass, and antique hardware.

3. William Raymond (WR) Yelland designed the picture-postcard cottage on the East Bay

Known for his work in the East Bay, William Raymond (WR) Yelland reflects the old European rural architectural style inspired by his time in France, reflected in the Thornburg/Normandy Village and Tupper and Reed. This Kensington picture book feels like it’s straight out of the French countryside.

2. Classic three story Presidio Heights Manse

This pretty yellow property was built in 1924. Set against the green backdrop of the Presidio, it offers some of the best offerings in city life along with a lush flora and fauna in its own grand design.

1. San Francisco’s Original Painted Lady

There’s no more San Francisco than living in one of the Painted Ladies in Alamo Square, unless it’s the OG. The oldest, built in 1892, was also the home of the original Ladies builder, Matthew Kavanaugh.

The post These are the Seven Hottest Properties of 2022 appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

]]> https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/these-are-the-seven-hottest-properties-of-2022/feed/ 0 https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/hottest-cities-to-hire-in-san-francisco-tops-record-for-gen-z/ https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/hottest-cities-to-hire-in-san-francisco-tops-record-for-gen-z/#respond Wed, 09 Mar 2022 11:54:54 +0000 https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/?p=17536 Many companies featured on Money advertise with us. Opinions are our own, but compensation and in-depth research to determine where and how companies may appear. Learn more about how we make money. After working from their family homes or college towns in the early days of the pandemic, Gen Z is finally moving to the …

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Many companies featured on Money advertise with us. Opinions are our own, but compensation and
in-depth research to determine where and how companies may appear. Learn more about how we make money.

After working from their family homes or college towns in the early days of the pandemic, Gen Z is finally moving to the big city.

A new report from RentCafe, a real estate listing firm, found the volume of rental applications from people born between 1997 and 2012 rose 21% over the past year, while the volume of applications for all other generations fell.

Some of that trend is likely to do with age: Renters tend to be younger than homeowners, and millennials, now entering their 30s and 40s, are in their peak homebuying years.

But certain cities saw outsize leaps in the share of Gen Z rental applications between 2020 and 2021. San Francisco took the top spot, with a 101% surge. Jersey City, New Jersey — located just across the river from New York City’s Manhattan borough — was next with a 95% bump in applications from Zoomers.

“Big cities are appealing for a host of reasons,” Nicholas Dempsey, an associate sociology professor at Eckerd College, said in the report, citing plentiful job opportunities, restaurants, gyms, public transportation and opportunities for networking (both professional and romantic).

The top 10 trendiest cities for Gen Z renters

1. san francisco
2. Jersey City, NJ
3. Manhattan, New York
4. Philadelphia
5. Boston
6. Arlington, Va
7. San Jose, California
8. Seattle
9. Minneapolis
10. Los Angeles

RentCafe’s list was based on a comparison of rental application data from between January and October 2021 and from the same period in 2020. The trendiest cities had the highest percent change in the share of Gen Z rental applications between 2020 and 2021.

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Every Saturday, Money real estate editor Sam Sharf dives deep into the world of real estate, offering a fresh take on the latest housing news for homeowners, buyers and daydreamers alike.

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Renting vs. owning: Which is cheaper?

Renting is a great option for young people, people building up their finances and credit, and folks who want lots of flexibility in their living situation. But as the housing market continues to burn white hot, rents are rising, too.

A recent survey from the real estate firm Redfin found that rents across the United States rose more than 15% between January 2021 and January 2022, with some cities — like Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; and Newark, New Jersey — seeing rent growth above 30%.

Increasingly expensive rent means that in some major American cities, it’s actually cheaper to own a starter home than it is to rent a comparable place to live. For those who’d rather buy than rent, a previous RentCafe report identified the cities where it’s easiest for a young family to save for a starter home. Bloomington, Illinois, topped that list.

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More from Money:

Rents Are So High It’s Cheaper to Own a House in These Major Cities

20 Places Where It’s Easiest to Save for Your First Home

Typical Listing Price for a House Nears $400,000 as the Spring Buying Frenzy Begins Early

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]]> https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/hottest-cities-to-hire-in-san-francisco-tops-record-for-gen-z/feed/ 0 https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/inflation-was-hottest-in-atlanta-mildest-in-san-francisco-in-2021/ https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/inflation-was-hottest-in-atlanta-mildest-in-san-francisco-in-2021/#respond Sun, 13 Feb 2022 13:08:26 +0000 https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/?p=16556 Consumer prices rose faster last year in large US metropolitan areas seeing an influx of new residents than in the nation overall, while inflation was milder in large coastal cities with less population growth. The Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell area saw the highest inflation among metropolitan areas with more than 2.5 million people—9.8% for the 12 months …

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Consumer prices rose faster last year in large US metropolitan areas seeing an influx of new residents than in the nation overall, while inflation was milder in large coastal cities with less population growth.

The Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell area saw the highest inflation among metropolitan areas with more than 2.5 million people—9.8% for the 12 months through December, according to the Labor Department. Phoenix, St. Louis and Tampa also saw annual inflation rates higher than the 7% national rate in December.

The San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward area, known as one of the country’s most-expensive places to live, saw 4.2% inflation last year, the lowest of any of the 23 large metro areas for which the Labor Department publishes inflation data. Inflation also came in below the national rate in the New York City, Boston and Washington, DC, metro areas.

Consumer price index, percentage change from a year earlier

Urban areas with the highest inflation rates as of year-end

Urban areas with the lowest inflation rates as of year-end

Urban areas with the highest inflation rates as of year-end

Urban areas with the lowest inflation rates as of year-end

Urban areas with the highest inflation rates as of year-end

Urban areas with the lowest inflation rates as of year-end

Urban areas with the highest inflation rates

as of year-end

Urban areas with the lowest inflation rates

as of year-end

Urban areas with the highest inflation rates

as of year-end

Urban areas with the lowest inflation rates

as of year-end

An important factor driving the regional divergences, according to economists, was pandemic-fueled population shifts from larger cities to suburbs or smaller metro areas, particularly in the Sunbelt, both by retiring baby boomers and remote workers seeking warmer weather and lower living costs.

The Atlanta and Houston metro areas gained nearly five new residents per thousand residents since March 2020, and Dallas gained almost a dozen per thousand, according to an analysis of domestic migration since the start of the pandemic by Moody’s Analytics, Equifax and CreditForecast. San Francisco, by contrast, lost nearly 27 residents per thousand inhabitants. New York lost close to 20 per thousand, and the Washington, DC, area lost more than a dozen per thousand.

In metro areas that saw added population, the influx helped drive up housing costs and job gains, which boosted incomes and, in turn, fueled demand for housing, transportation and services such as dining and entertainment.

Housing costs, accounting for almost a third of the Labor Department’s consumer-price index, were the largest single driver of inflation in the Atlanta area and similar places last year. The CPI’s shelter index measures the cost of tenants’ rent and homeowners’ imputed rent, or the amount they would have to pay each month to rent their own house.

The shelter index jumped 10.2% in the Phoenix area and 7.7% in the Atlanta area late last year; it rose 1.2% in the New York metro area and 0.8% in the San Francisco area. The index climbed 4.1% for the nation.

“The lion’s share of difference between Atlanta and the rest of the country has to do with what’s happening with shelter,” said Brent Meyer, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. “A lot of what’s going on here driving up rental prices is the booming economy,” he added.

Atlanta’s BeltLine area, where walkability is a draw for newcomers.

The Federal Reserve said last month that the Atlanta region continued to attract home buyers from higher-cost markets such as the Northeast and West Coast in the final weeks of 2021.

Median sale prices of homes in Atlanta rose nearly 23% in the year to December, according to Redfin corp

, a real-estate brokerage, faster than the national increase of 15.2%. They climbed 10.3% in the San Francisco area.

While prices are rising more quickly in cities including Atlanta, such places remain more affordable than coastal cities like San Francisco.

Alice Yen moved from San Francisco to Atlanta: ‘We are getting much more for what we’re paying for.’

“In spite of that large increase, it’s still a very affordable and attractive destination; it’s not as much as a discount as if you moved two years ago, but it’s still a sizable discount,” said Redfin economist Taylor Marr, referring to Atlanta compared with New York or San Francisco.

Alice Yen moved from San Francisco to Atlanta with her husband in July 2021, after living in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metro area for about a decade. She wanted to live closer to her family in North Carolina and found Atlanta’s BeltLine community attractive because of its walkability, easy access to entertainment and urban charm.

Since relocating, Ms. Yen said she has noticed prices rising a bit, but said she still finds living in Atlanta to be a much better deal.

“I don’t know if we’re spending less overall, but we are getting much more for what we’re paying for,” she said. “It’s possible to live in Atlanta and still be able to buy a home. I’ve seen prices definitely going up across the board, but houses are still much more reasonable than the Bay Area.”

Even before the pandemic, remote workers were leaving big cities for smaller ones, seeking a lower cost of living and often lower taxes and better weather. The pandemic has accelerated the trend. California is losing more than twice as many people to domestic migration as it was before the pandemic, a recent report from University of California researchers showed.

Population increases in cities such as Atlanta helped drive up housing costs.

A report by the moving company North American Van Lines Inc. found that Florida, Arizona and Texas were among the top destinations for people moving last year, as many took advantage of remote-work opportunities to quit high-cost states such as California, New York and Illinois.

More people moving to less-walkable cities with fewer public transportation options has boosted inflation, too. Transportation costs are also up in Atlanta. The Labor Department’s measure of what consumers pay for new and used vehicles, as well as gasoline, rose 17.4% on the year in San Francisco but jumped 29.3% in Atlanta. Nationally, the measure was up 21.1% in 2021.

Economists said some of the differences in inflation might stem from less- restrictive Covid-19 measures in the South compared with states including California. Venues such as restaurants are more likely to be open for business in Atlanta, helping to boost demand.

In late 2021, Atlanta and Phoenix saw increases in recreation costs, for items such as sporting equipment and concert admissions, and apparel, which were well above the national average.

Businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area said they are struggling with inflation, particularly in wages as California’s minimum wage starts at $14 an hour, and are having to pass on the higher costs to customers.

Median sale prices of homes in San Francisco rose at a pace in the year to December that was lower than the national increase.

Photo:

Carlos Barria/Reuters

“Everything was so expensive to begin with [in the San Francisco area], maybe the rest of the country is just catching up with us,” said Paul Lazzareschi, co-owner of Depot Café and Bookstore in Mill Valley, near San Francisco. “The upside to coronavirus is it gave us the ability to use outdoor seating and enlarge our space and you could raise prices without anyone saying a word.”

His establishment reopened just over a year ago after a refurbishment, with prices at a relatively high level “because Covid allowed that, people didn’t complain about paying $6 for a croissant.”

Population growth in places such as Atlanta and Phoenix, which drives up housing costs, could eventually fizzle out as it has in other cities.

“Denver and Salt Lake City grew tremendously, largely on the backs of New York and San Francisco for years,” said Adam Kamins, director of regional economics at Moody’s Analytics.

“Denver’s costs rose dramatically, still nowhere near those in San Francisco, but enough that you’re now seeing migration out of Denver into cheaper places like Boise, so it is possible that growth eventually spills over into another market.”

Write to Bryan Mena at bryan.mena@wsj.com and Harriet Torry at harriet.torry@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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]]> https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/inflation-was-hottest-in-atlanta-mildest-in-san-francisco-in-2021/feed/ 0 https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/san-francisco-simply-recorded-its-hottest-day-of-the-yr/ https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/san-francisco-simply-recorded-its-hottest-day-of-the-yr/#respond Tue, 11 Jan 2022 14:22:55 +0000 https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/?p=15094 Dolores Park filled with sunbathers on March 31, 2021 when the skies over San Francisco were clear and sunny. A count If you went outside today and thought it felt a little hotter than usual, that’s because it is. With a temperature of 84 degrees in the early afternoon, today is officially the hottest day …

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Dolores Park filled with sunbathers on March 31, 2021 when the skies over San Francisco were clear and sunny.

A count

If you went outside today and thought it felt a little hotter than usual, that’s because it is. With a temperature of 84 degrees in the early afternoon, today is officially the hottest day in San Francisco this year, according to ABC 7 meteorologist Drew Tuma. Before this week, San Francisco had not seen temperatures exceeding 70 degrees in over two months.

With 84 ° it is officially the hottest day of this year in San Francisco pic.twitter.com/popYSwVB2j

– Drew Tuma (@ DrewTumaABC7) August 28, 2021

It’s even hotter in the Bay Area, with Fremont and Redwood City hitting the lower end of the 90s, and San Jose and Palo Alto both hitting the mid-90s.

The temperature rise is the result of two separate high pressure systems – one over the Eastern Pacific and one over the Texas Panhandle.

In addition to the heat, the San Francisco Bay Area will also be hit by poor air quality this weekend. The Bay Area Quality Management District had already issued a spare-the-air alarm in the region for Friday and Saturday due to the presence of forest fire smoke and has since been extended to Sunday. Until the end of the warning, residents are prohibited from burning wood indoors and outdoors.

Cooler temperatures are expected for Sunday and the rest of the week. Forecasts predict a low 70s on Sunday and a mid to high 60s by Friday.

The Bay City News Service contributed to coverage of this story.

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]]> https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/san-francisco-simply-recorded-its-hottest-day-of-the-yr/feed/ 0 https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/demise-valley-hits-130-degrees-the-most-popular-temperature-in-107-years/ https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/demise-valley-hits-130-degrees-the-most-popular-temperature-in-107-years/#respond Sun, 01 Aug 2021 11:29:53 +0000 https://dailysanfranciscobaynews.com/?p=9343 The hottest temperature on Earth ever recorded may have been reached on Sunday afternoon, as the mercury in California’s Death Valley hit 130 degrees.   The temperature was reached at 3.41pm Pacific time on Sunday, according to the National Weather Service.  If verified, the reading would break Death Valley’s previous August record by three degrees, the …

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The hottest temperature on Earth ever recorded may have been reached on Sunday afternoon, as the mercury in California’s Death Valley hit 130 degrees.  

The temperature was reached at 3.41pm Pacific time on Sunday, according to the National Weather Service. 

If verified, the reading would break Death Valley’s previous August record by three degrees, the Weather Service tweeted. In a follow up tweet the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said it will verify the temperature.

‘Everything I’ve seen so far indicates that is a legitimate observation,’ said Randy Cerveny, who leads the World Meteorological Organization’s weather and climate extremes team. 

Scroll down for video  

Visitors posted the record online; the visitor center thermometer runs 3-4 degrees warmer

 

Tourists visiting the California park posted series of photos of the barren landscape

Death Valley is famed for being the hottest place on Earth, and on Sunday did not disappoint

Fires raging close to houses in Salinas, California, last night – around 260 miles west of Death Valley

Fires raging close to houses in Salinas, California, last night – around 260 miles west of Death Valley

Trees and bushes burning in Salinas, California, last night – around 260 miles west of Death Valley

In an email to The Washington Post, he wrote: ‘I am recommending that the World Meteorological Organization preliminarily accept the observation. 

‘In the upcoming weeks, we will, of course, be examining it in detail, along with the U.S. National Climate Extremes Committee, using one of our international evaluation teams.’ 

Death Valley currently holds the record for the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth – a record set on July 10, 1913, of 134 degrees.

Yet experts for years have believed that the reading was not accurate.

An extensive analysis of that record conducted in 2016 by Christopher Burt, an expert on extreme weather data, concluded it was ‘essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective.’ 

The remains of a home in Salinas that was destroyed by wild fires last night

A chimney block stands naked against the horizon after a home was destroyed by flames in Salinas, west of Death Valley, in California

Experts believe that Sunday’s temperature was the hottest ever accurately recorded

A 131F reading from Kebili, Tunisia, set on July 7, 1931, also has ‘serious credibility issues,’ according to Burt. 

Many believe that a 129F readings recorded in Death Valley on June 30, 2013, and in Kuwait and Pakistan in 2016 and 2017, were the highest ever reliably measured on the planet. 

If only those readings are considered, then Sunday’s 130-degree temperature would unseat them as the highest measured.  

Death Valley is the lowest, driest and hottest location in the United States. 

Furnace Creek, where its temperature is measured, sits at 190 feet below sea level in the Mojave Desert of southeastern California.  

In July 2018, its average temperature of 108.1F represented the hottest month ever measured on the planet. During that month, it hit at least 120 degrees on 21 days. 

Typically, such blazing heat records happen in July — the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest month — which makes Sunday’s 130F reading stand out.

Heavy smoke near Salinas, California, blotted out the sun on Sunday as wildfires raged

Wildfires swept across Contra Costa County in California on Sunday, sparked by lightning

Firefighters battled to put out the blazes on Sunday, inland from San Francisco

The roasting temperature came as a heat wave continues to grip much of the western United States.

More than 80 million people were under heat alerts Friday from the Central and Southern Plains as well as for nearly the entire West Coast.  

Oakland, California, on Friday hit 100F for the first time on record in August, while Phoenix tied its highest temperature for the month: 117F.

On Saturday, Needles, in California’s southeastern desert, soared to 123 degrees, its highest August temperature on record.

Sacramento hit 112F on Sunday, topping its previous August record of 110F. 

The hot weather overwhelmed the state’s electrical grid, prompting the California Independent System Operator (ISO), which runs the grid, to warn of an electricity supply shortage on Sunday evening.

California ISO sought to buy additional power to avert another rolling outage and issued a Flex Alert, urging utility customers to conserve energy during the late afternoon and evening hours.

The heat wave across the western United States is expected to last until Wednesday

Blackouts hit a large swathe of California on Friday evening from 6.30-10pm

Forecasters warned of ‘stifling heat’ across a large part of the western United States

‘It’s going to be tight,’ said Severin Borenstein, a board member of the ISO and energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

‘There is a real concern that they would have to do it again tomorrow and Tuesday,’ he said Sunday about the rolling outages.

California ISO ordered the first rolling outages in nearly 20 years on Friday when it directed utilities around the state to shed their power loads. 

The state’s three biggest utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric — turned off power to more than 410,000 homes and businesses for about an hour at a time until the emergency declaration ended 3 1/2 hours later.

The ISO instituted a second, but shorter, rolling outage Saturday evening that cut power to more than 200,000 customers.

The power grid is mostly stressed during the late afternoon and early evening because of higher demand and solar energy production falling after the sun sets.

California increasingly relies on energy from renewable sources instead of natural gas-fired plants. During the summer months, the state imports power when demand goes up, but a heat wave sweeping Western states meant there was less available, Borenstein said.

‘They are literally calling as well as emailing and saying, “Do you have any power to sell us to everyone in the West,”‘ he said. ‘But they can’t force the other areas to sell their electricity when those other areas need it for themselves.’

La Jolla beach near San Diego was packed on Saturday as people sought respire from heat

Baker Beach, beneath San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, was a popular destination Saturday

Kayakers in La Jolla hoped to cool off on Saturday amid searing, record-breaking heat

The last time the state ordered rolling outages was during an energy crisis in 2001. Blackouts occurred several times from January to May, including one that affected more than 1.5 million customers. 

The cause was a combination of energy shortages and market manipulation by energy wholesalers, infamously including Enron Corp, that drove up prices by withholding supplies.

The heat sent Californians to outdoor spaces and waterways, even as officials worried about the risk of increased coronavirus transmission. The state reported another 77 deaths Sunday, bringing total deaths in California from the virus above 11,200.

Unsettling weather also triggered an unusual warning by the weather service of a fire-induced tornado at an out-of-control forest fire that broke out north of Lake Tahoe on Saturday afternoon.

A massive fire cloud known as a pyrocumulonimbus formed over the fire, which started east of the town of Loyalton, about 40 miles west of Reno, Nevada. 

When high winds collided with the fire and whipped it into the air, a spectacular tornado-shaped spiral of flames was formed.

The fire has burned at least 45 square miles and triggered evacuation orders for sparsely populated communities along State Route 395 by the California-Nevada border, said Tahoe National Forest spokesman Joe Flannery.

Firefighters aided by water-dropping helicopters and air tankers faced ‘extreme fire behavior,’ he said, and worked through the night to extinguish spot fires and protect threatened structures.

At one point, the fast-moving fire jumped a highway and came dangerously close to a fire truck. A fire crew from Truckee tweeted a video of firefighters dragging hoses as they ran alongside a moving truck that was dodging the flames.

Ryan Peel said firefighters created some defensive space around his slot machine distribution warehouse in Chilcoot, but he was worried the erratic winds could still put his business in the line of fire.

‘Yesterday was extremely emotional, as we were at the mercy of the wind and the unpredictability of the fire,’ Peel said. ‘I was stressed and terrified at the idea of losing everything I’ve spent my life working for.’

With zero containment and strong winds in the forecast, he said, ‘we are not out of the woods yet’.

On Sunday, a rare summer thunderstorm brought lightning (pictured over Healdsburg, California, on Sunday) that sparked several small blazes in Northern California and stoked a huge wildfire that has forced hundreds of people from their homes north of Los Angeles

Lightning illuminates the sky over the eastern span of the Bay Bridge as a storm passed through San Francisco on Sunday morning

More than 4,500 buildings remained threatened by the fire burning toward thick, dry brush in the Angeles National Forest. Firefighters already battling the blaze in steep, rugged terrain with scorching heat faced more hurdles when hundreds of lightning strikes (pictured over San Francisco) and winds up to 15mph pushed the flames uphill

On Sunday, a rare summer thunderstorm brought lightning that sparked several small blazes in Northern California and stoked a huge wildfire that has forced hundreds of people from their homes north of Los Angeles.

More than 4,500 buildings remained threatened by the fire burning toward thick, dry brush in the Angeles National Forest. 

Firefighters already battling the blaze in steep, rugged terrain with scorching heat faced more hurdles when hundreds of lightning strikes and winds up to 15mph pushed the flames uphill.

‘We set up a containment line at the top of the hills so the fire doesn’t spill over to the other side and cause it to spread, but it was obviously difficult given the erratic wind and some other conditions,’ said fire spokesman Jake Miller.

The Lake Fire was just 12 per cent contained Sunday and has burned nearly 28 square miles of brush and trees. Fire officials said 33 buildings had been destroyed, including at least a dozen homes.

Temperatures reached more than 110 degrees and a pyrocumulus created erratic fire behavior, fire spokesman Tom Ewald said.

Thunderstorm and excessive heat were also a concern for firefighters battling a blaze that blackened almost 4 square miles in the foothills above the Los Angeles suburb of Azusa. 

The fire, believed to be started Thursday by a homeless man, is only 3 per cent contained.

Due to the triple-digit temperatures throughout the weekend and the combination of prolonged heat and smoke from wildfires, ozone pollution reached levels not seen in a decade in some areas. 

Air quality may reach unhealthy to very unhealthy levels in several regions of Southern California on Sunday and Monday afternoons, the South Coast Air Quality Management District said.

In Northern California, moisture from an offshore tropical storm fueled a thunderstorm that brought nonstop lightning strikes early Sunday, some of which ignited small fires and knocked out power across the San Francisco Bay Area.

Wind gusts reached 75mph according to the NWS, which said another round of lightning may develop early Monday.

‘This is probably the most widespread and violent summer thunderstorm event in memory for Bay Area, & it’s also one of the hottest nights in years,’ tweeted Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Scientists have found that the intensity, duration and frequency of heat waves worldwide are increasing due to human-caused climate change. 

A 2019 study found the planet has entered a ‘new climate regime’ with ‘extraordinary’ heat waves that global warming is worsening. 

Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle are among the cities under heat alerts.

For the West, an excessive heat warning is in effect until Wednesday for parts of Arizona, California and Nevada, with high temperatures expected to reach 110-125 degrees. 

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