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Jelani Cobb | Our Long, Forgotten History of Election-Related Violence
Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker
Cobb writes: "In the fall of 1856, according to news reports, a Baltimore resident named Charles Brown was 'peaceably walking along the street' when he was shot dead."
It was a local Election Day, and Brown was in the vicinity of a Twelfth Ward polling place. Democrats attempting to enter it had been repelled by supporters of the American Party, better known as the Know-Nothings. For some two hours, the groups exchanged gunfire in what the Baltimore American described as “guerrilla warfare.” Brown was one of five people killed, and the newspaper marvelled that more lives were not lost. This was not an uncommon event. The American Party, a group defined by its truculent nativism, frequently deployed violence to political ends, particularly against immigrant voters. As Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, in their book “American Violence: A Documentary History,” wrote of Baltimore, “In many districts immigrants were stopped from voting entirely.”
The United States is considered one of the most stable democracies in the world, but it has a long, mostly forgotten history of election-related violence. In 1834, during clashes between Whigs and Democrats in Philadelphia, an entire city block was burned to the ground. In 1874, more than five thousand men fought in the streets of New Orleans, in a battle between supporters of Louisiana’s Republican governor, William Kellogg, and of the White League, a group allied with the Democrats. And the nation’s record of overlooking the violent prevention of Black suffrage is much longer than its record of protecting Black voters. The general public tends to view such calamities as a static record of the past, but historians tend to look at them the way that meteorologists look at hurricanes: as a predictable outcome when a number of recognizable variables align in familiar ways. In the aftermath of events in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, we are in hurricane season.
Following the release, on August 23rd, of a video showing Officer Rusten Sheskey shooting Jacob Blake, an unarmed twenty-nine-year-old Black man, seven times in the back, protesters poured into the streets of Kenosha. Some of them engaged in looting, and, two nights later, Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen-year-old with an AR-15-style rifle, reportedly crossed state lines, from Illinois, to defend property in the city. According to prosecutors, he shot three protesters, two of them fatally. Several nights later, a caravan of Trump supporters drove through downtown Portland, where anti-police-brutality protesters have been gathering for months, and fired paintballs and pepper spray into the crowd. Aaron J. Danielson, a supporter of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, was shot dead; the suspect, Michael Reinoehl, an Antifa supporter, was fatally shot by law-enforcement officers last Thursday, as they attempted to apprehend him south of Seattle.
Throughout these horrendous developments, Donald Trump has been at cross-purposes with the calling of his office. He has sown conflict where none existed and exacerbated it where it did. On a visit to Kenosha, Trump did not mention Blake, who has been left partially paralyzed. But he has said that Rittenhouse, who has been charged with homicide, was likely acting in self-defense, claiming—without offering any evidence, as is the President’s habit—that Rittenhouse “probably would’ve been killed by protesters.” In 2013, when President Obama spoke about Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black seventeen-year-old who was shot to death in Sanford, Florida, he addressed racism but not the particulars of the case, so as to not interfere with legal proceedings. Republicans were nevertheless quick to accuse Obama of impropriety. Seven years later, Party leaders have made no such complaints about Trump’s advocating for Rittenhouse.
The Trump Presidency has been an escalating series of insults, each enabling greater violations of norms, ethics, and laws. That pattern now seems poised to upend democracy itself. It began even before Trump took office, when he refused to release his tax returns; claimed that his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, should be in jail; and openly enlisted a foreign adversary to help achieve that end. This year, he has removed five inspectors general from their posts and, with the assistance of Attorney General William Barr, corrupted the Department of Justice to such a degree that we are now unsure of the legal meaning of the word “guilty” when applied to a Trump-connected defendant.
The likelihood of political violence was also apparent from the start. Trump’s 2016 rallies tipped over into displays of aggression directed at the media and at those who opposed him. Such is the chaos of today that we’ve nearly forgotten that, two years ago, Cesar Sayoc mailed pipe bombs to Obama, Clinton, and fourteen others he believed had treated Trump unfairly. Sayoc pleaded guilty; his lawyers described him as “a Donald Trump super-fan” who suffered from mental illness, leaving him vulnerable to the antagonisms of the political climate. The twenty-one-year-old Patrick Crusius was charged with fatally shooting twenty-three people in El Paso last year. The language of an anti-immigrant manifesto he allegedly posted before the shooting was noted for its echoes of Trump’s rationalizations for building his border wall. (Crusius pleaded not guilty.) This May, the Michigan legislature temporarily shut down, after armed militia members entered the capitol to protest the state’s stay-at-home order. A couple of weeks earlier, Trump had tweeted, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”
The Transition Integrity Project, a nonpartisan group of academics, journalists, and current and former government and party officials, recently released a report outlining a number of election scenarios that are both plausible and terrifying. Trump has primed his followers with repeated warnings of voter fraud, so there is a real possibility that they may denounce as illegitimate any outcome in which he loses. Beyond that, the report suggests, the Administration could seize mail-in ballots in order to prevent them from being counted, or pressure Republican-controlled legislatures to certify results before all mail-in ballots have arrived. The authors conclude that “voting fraud is virtually non-existent, but Trump lies about it to create a narrative designed to politically mobilize his base and to create the basis for contesting the results should he lose. The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”
This is where we are—at the perilous logical extension of all that Trump represents. A weather forecast is not a prediction of the inevitable. We are not doomed to witness a catastrophic tempest this fall, but anyone who is paying attention knows that the winds have begun to pick up.
A scientist at work on a COVID-19 vaccine candidate at Bogazici University in Istanbul in August. (photo: Onur Coban/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
How Can You Tell if a COVID-19 Vaccine Is Working
Joe Palca, NPR
Palca writes: "Several vaccines are currently in large-scale studies to see if they can prevent COVID-19, and more are on the way."
READ MORE
This jail booking photo from the Screven County Sheriff's Office show former Georgia state trooper Jacob Thompson, who was charged with felony murder for fatally shooting a driver who refused to pull over for a broken tail light Aug. 7, 2020. (photo: Screven County Sheriff's Office/AP)
Bond Denied for Georgia Trooper Charged in Fatal Shooting of Black Motorist
The Grio
Excerpt: "A judge says it's 'inappropriate' to grant bond to Jacob Gordon Thompson, given the facts of the case."
SYLVANIA, Ga. (AP) — A Georgia judge has denied bond for a former Georgia State Patrol trooper accused of murder in the August shooting death of a 60-year-old Black man who refused to stop for a broken tail light.
Screven County Judge F. Gates Peed on Friday ruled that it “would be inappropriate” to grant bond at the moment for Jacob Gordon Thompson, given the facts of the case.
Thompson, who is white, briefly chased Julian Lewis on Aug. 7 before forcing Lewis’ car into a ditch and fatally shooting Lewis in the head.
Thompson wrote in his incident report that he feared for his life and fired one shot when Lewis revved his engine and turned his steering wheel as if he wanted to ram the trooper.
Thompson was arrested a week later on a charge of felony murder and aggravated assault by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He remains in custody at the Screven County Jail, near the state’s South Carolina border.
Attorney Francys Johnson, who is representing the Lewis family, said that Peed’s denial of bond for Thompson is a positive sign for the current movement for racial equality in American policing.
“The unprecedented pace of the investigation is a direct result of years of activism on these issues along with a sea-change in law enforcement leadership at the top of the GBI,” Johnson said in a statement Friday. “This case is not proceeding as business as usual.”
The incident report Thompson filed says he spotted a Nissan Sentra driving with a broken tail light at about 9 p.m. and turned on his lights to initiate a traffic stop in rural Screven County. He said the driver flashed both his turn signals and motioned with a hand outside his window but made no effort to stop.
Thomspon wrote that he followed the car at speeds up to 65 mph until the vehicle rolled through a stop sign. The trooper then performed a maneuver that forced the car into a ditch. Thompson said he pulled alongside the vehicle and drew his gun as he got out of his cruiser.
“At some point, I heard the engine on the violator’s vehicle revving at a high rate of speed,” Thompson wrote in his report. “I activated the light on my weapon and observed the violator with both hands on the steering wheel. I saw him wrenching the steering wheel in an aggressive back and forth manner towards me and my patrol vehicle.”
He continued: “It appeared to me that the violator was trying to use his vehicle to injure me. Being in fear for my life and safety, I discharged my weapon once.”
The trooper’s bullet hit Lewis in the forehead. Thompson wrote that he tried to render first aid until paramedics arrived.
Construction executive Marjorie Taylor Greene, third from left, with supporters at a primary election watch party on Aug. 11, 2020, in Rome, Ga. (photo: Mike Stewart/AP)
GOP Candidate Poses With Rifle, Says She's Targeting 'Socialist' Congresswomen
Rachael Bade and John Wagner, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "A House candidate whom President Trump recently called 'a future Republican Star' posted an image of herself holding a rifle with photos of three liberal congresswomen of color and the vow to 'go on the offense' against members of the 'Squad,' an unprecedented threat against lawmakers from a probable future colleague."
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the GOP candidate for a Georgia congressional seat in a heavily Republican district and a professed QAnon conspiracy believer, posted the photoshopped image Thursday on Facebook. The image includes Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). On Friday, the post had been taken down.
Before it was removed, the caption under the gun-toting Greene read: “Squad’s worst nightmare.”
“Hate America leftists want to take this country down,” Greene wrote. “Our country is on the line. America needs fighters who speak the truth. We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart. Americans must take our country back. SAVE AMERICA. STOP SOCIALISM. DEFEAT THE DEMOCRATS!”
Greene, in a separate post, said she was raffling off an AR-15 firearm.
She did not respond to a request for comment.
House Republican leaders had no immediate comment on the post, an apparent call to arms as Trump has spoken out against lawlessness and warned that a Joe Biden presidency would plunge the nation into violence and chaos.
Omar, however, called on Facebook to remove the post immediately.
“Posting a photo with an assault rifle next to the faces of three women of color is not advertising. It’s incitement,” Omar wrote on Twitter. “There are already death threats in response to this post. Facebook should remove this violent provocation.”
Tlaib also weighed in on Twitter, writing: “It’s dangerous in a time of rising political violence openly encouraged by this fascist President that a soon-to-be member of Congress thinks a post threatening women’s lives is acceptable. Take it down. P.S. Imagine it was me w/ a rifle. The post would have been down in seconds.”
It was unclear whether the U.S. Capitol Police, which is tasked with ensuring the safety of members of Congress, would investigate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called on Republicans to “immediately condemn this dangerous threat of violence against Democratic Congresswomen.”
Greene has already created problems for Republicans. As an adherent of the QAnon conspiracy, she backs the baseless theory that Trump is battling a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs that worships Satan and traffics children for sex. The FBI has labeled the group a domestic terrorism threat.
Greene won a Republican primary runoff in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District last month. Her victory in a northwestern swath of the state that has favored Republicans by wide margins sets her up to become QAnon’s first open devotee in Congress.
Greene has been caught on camera calling Black voters “slaves” to the Democratic Party and likening the election of Muslim lawmakers to an “Islamic invasion” of the U.S. government.
The day after the runoff, Trump hailed Greene as a “future Republican Star,” tweeting that she is “strong on everything and never gives up — a real WINNER!” He did not endorse in the runoff.
Last week, Greene attended Trump’s White House speech in which he accepted the Republican presidential nomination.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has said he would seat Greene if she is elected to Congress, but the post drastically escalates the challenge for GOP leaders as many rank-and-file members worry about how to respond to her.
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney (Wyo.) distanced themselves from Greene after videos of her making racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic comments were revealed.
A group of Republicans had tried to convince McCarthy to support her primary opponent to ensure she was not seated, but McCarthy refused and in an apparent peace accord made an overture to her before her victory.
Traditionally, members who engage in questionable behavior are punished. Last year, McCarthy removed Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) from a committee for a string of racist comments.
In a recent interview, Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), the centrist leader of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, voiced his own concern about what such rhetoric would mean for the institution. He said he hopes candidates like Greene change their language — if not their views as well — when they are elected to the House.
“I’ve watched these candidates who have sort of embraced that hard-right rhetoric and I would encourage them to look at the rhetoric. You are a member of the House and those extreme positions are very troublesome positions,” he said. “If you believe in those positions, there’s no place in the Republican Party, that I believe in, for those.”
Greene’s posts, however, suggest she has no intention of muting herself.
Former representative Charles W. Boustany Jr. (R-La.) said that he has been “deeply concerned” by the actions of some of the incoming GOP candidates — and that some of his former colleagues appear to be “cowed into silence” instead of pushing back on the direction the party has taken. It is up to the House GOP leadership, he said, to set candidates using this type of rhetoric on track — otherwise, “the party is headed for a really bad place and permanent minority status.”
“I’m deeply concerned at the extent to which the president has fomented these kinds of divisions within our party and has fomented some of the more violent extremist type of activity out there, and I think that’s wrong,” Boustany said. “So, in my view, I hope these trends reverse, but I don’t see them reversing without very principled and strong leadership emerging from those who have the responsibility to step forward and say enough is enough.”
Several lawmakers of color say they are starting to fear for their safety amid an apparent call to arms by some on the right. This week, Facebook removed two posts by Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) in which the former police officer wrote of protesters, “One way ticket fellas. Have your affairs in order. Me? . . . I wouldn’t even spill my beer. I’d drop any 10 of you where you stand.”
“I don’t mind when people have political or ideological differences with me and my other colleagues who are Black and Brown . . . but when people begin to question my humanity based on my race, it becomes increasingly difficult to work with them,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.) said in an interview before Greene’s post.
The move to incite armed groups, he added, is even more worrisome: “If this is tolerated, we’re going to go downhill.”
Caroline Teti of Give Directly Kenya in front of a household selected for the universal basic income study. (photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images)
How a Basic Income Experiment Helped These Kenyans Weather the Covid-19 Crisis
Kelsey Piper, Vox
Excerpt: "People getting a UBI were less likely to go hungry as Kenya shut down."
everal years ago, researchers in Kenya decided to study the effects of a universal basic income (UBI) trial on people’s well-being. Some 6,000 recipients in a 12-year trial beginning around 2017 received 75 cents a day — not much, but enough, their research found, for people to be less food-insecure and more likely to start a business. Others received payments for just two years (that ended in December 2019), and still others received a lump sum payment.
In early 2020, the coronavirus hit. In response, governments like Kenya’s imposed harsh lockdowns that sought to prevent the virus’s spread, but that also had devastating impacts on the economy.
That prompted researchers to ask: How does receiving a UBI (or having received a UBI up until recently) affect how communities are hit by a serious economic setback like this one? The researchers decided to check back in on the households in their UBI trial. This week, Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist Abhijit Banerjee, GiveDirectly’s Michael Faye, University of California San Diego’s Paul Niehaus, and MIT’s Tavneet Suri released a working paper — meaning it has not yet undergone peer review — on what they found. The late Princeton economist Alan Krueger was also a co-author.
Mostly, they found encouraging news: Even a very small UBI can really help with a deeply difficult situation. The lockdown in Kenya to reduce the spread of the coronavirus was hard on rural communities like those in the UBI study, which were already quite poor. The social safety net is limited, and people go hungry even in good times. When people earned less money, they were more likely to have to give up necessities. Food insecurity was widespread — 68 percent of households in the control group reported experiencing hunger in the last 30 days.
But the UBI measurably improved things — not just for the people still receiving it but also in the group where the last payments stopped in December. “Recipients were 4.9-10.8 percentage points less likely to report experiencing hunger,” the paper finds, and “3.6-5.7 percentage points less likely to have had a household member sick during the last 30 days.” Recipients were even less likely to be depressed.
It should be noted that almost no one in either the experimental or control groups actually had the coronavirus, which likely hadn’t reached rural Kenya by the time of the study — though its effects certainly had, through a nationwide lockdown that was stricter than those in much of the US.
Here’s how the UBI actually played out: In good times, the UBI had allowed many recipients to start businesses. When the lockdown happened, business income plunged. But UBI meant that this wasn’t as devastating to those families as it otherwise would have been.
“UBI lets people start businesses and have more business income,” Tavneet Suri, one of the co-authors of the paper, told me. “As the pandemic comes along, they lose some of that business income. But the businesses stay open; they’re still doing some transactions.” A small business owner, she said, will “expect the income to vary a lot,” and with UBI, they’re “not subject to having to exit if it varies.”
People who did not start businesses still typically saw higher income as UBI recipients and were less likely to be hungry now. As for the finding that they were less likely to be sick, perhaps having a bit more money made it less likely that household members got sick from other sources — because they could afford to eat better, access clean water, or rest when they needed it.
The far-reaching benefits of a UBI
Proponents of UBI have argued for years that consistent benefits can improve people’s lives when times are good as well as when they’re difficult. In good times, they encourage people to invest in their future — for example, by starting businesses or getting education or training. And in bad times, they mitigate the downsides of having taken risks like starting a business, so that people can still eat.
Knowing they’ll have some income no matter how bad things get may encourage people to take bigger risks when things are good. “That’s what we’re seeing” from the results in the study, Suri told me. “Income benefits in good times and then stability benefits during bad times.”
The researchers looked, too, at whether the UBI might have encouraged recipients to do more activities that risked the spread of the coronavirus. For instance, maybe having more money would make people more likely to have social interactions with friends and family. In normal times, that’s good news. And usually, if they’re more likely to go to the doctor with a health concern, that’s good too — but during the pandemic, it might expose them or the doctor to the coronavirus. If UBI increases social interaction or health system utilization, then under these unusual circumstances that potentially increases the spread of disease.
Researchers didn’t find any such effects, though. Instead, “Transfers generally had small beneficial effects or null effects on behaviors related to public health.” Recipients were less likely to see a doctor — because they were less likely to get sick — and maybe slightly less likely to have social interactions. There were no effects found on work or on commercial activities like shopping.
Another criticism frequently aired about using a universal basic income for disaster relief is that giving people money can increase demand for goods — say, food — but the disaster will have restricted the supply.
“If you talk to most economists, economists are always like ‘give cash, supply chains are generally functioning in most areas.’ But the one exception is disasters,” Rema Hanna, a development economist at the Kennedy School at Harvard, told me. For example, if there is a severe famine, giving everyone in the world a trillion dollars would not mean there’s enough food for everyone — it would instead result in people bidding against each other for more and more expensive food. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give cash as disaster aid, she said, but it does mean it’s important you’re “sure that supply chains are functioning.”
But in this case, it looks like they are. When everyone in a village got a cash transfer, they ate better rather than just bid up the price of food. The coronavirus lockdown in Kenya mostly blocked trade from large cities and across international borders, Suri told me, while food is mostly conveyed more locally. And some people can shift production to ensure there’s more food in a crisis — even when the country is locked down, the food supply is not fully fixed. So giving people more money really does help, and it doesn’t just lead to increased food prices. (Other research has reached the same conclusion.)
The coronavirus crisis is unlike most crises that a social support net has to weather, but the lessons from Kenya’s experiment are hardly uniquely applicable to the pandemic. Many of the results researchers observe also apply to other short-term times of difficulty or scarcity, from the annual dry season to a drought year or a natural disaster.
It seems that, in hard times, UBI doesn’t fix everything — but it can make things a little easier. And fears that it would make the problems that befall people worse have failed to materialize. The new study is a bit more evidence that UBI should be a big part of our thinking as we figure out how to ensure the world’s poorest can endure the crises — from global warming to pandemics — ahead.
Maria Kolesnikova pictured last month. Unidentified men seized her in central Minsk and drove her away in a minibus, witnesses say. (photo: Tatyana Zenkovich/EPA)
Belarus Opposition Leader Maria Kolesnikova 'Snatched From Street' in Minsk
Luke Harding, Guardian UK
Harding writes: "Unidentified masked men snatched the leading Belarusian opposition figure, Maria Kolesnikova, from the street in the centre of the capital, Minsk, on Monday and drove her away in a minivan, witnesses told local media."
Kolesnikova on council calling for a peaceful transfer of power amid post-election protests
Kolesnikova was one of the campaign partners of the opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who claimed victory against the long-ruling president, Alexander Lukashenko, in disputed elections on 9 August.
Kolesnikova was reportedly seized soon after 10am local time while walking close to Minsk’s national art museum. Three other members of the opposition coordination council have also vanished, in what appears to be a targeted attempt by the authorities to wipe out the protest movement.
Kolesnikova is the most prominent political figure still inside Belarus.
Lukashenko’s victory – in a poll widely seen as rigged – has sparked mass protests. On Sunday, more than 100,000 people marched on the president’s residence, calling on him to quit. Riot police wearing balaclavas arrested 633 people. Gangs of pro-government thugs beat up protesters on their way home.
It is unclear who abducted Koselnikova. Her coordination council colleagues who have disappeared include Anton Rodnenkov, Ivan Kravtsov and Maxim Bogretsov. Her press team is also missing.
Speaking to the local news website Tut.by, a woman identified as Anastasia said she spotted Kolesnikova in the street. She said she was about to go up to her and to thank her for her work when she changed her mind, thinking Kolesnikova looked exhausted.
She said: “Then I noticed a dark minivan with the slogan “Svyaz” on the side parked up not far from the museum. I carried on and then heard the sound of a telephone falling on the tarmac. I turned round and saw people in civilian clothes and masks dragging Maria into the van. The phone flew out of her hand. One of them picked it up, jumped into the van and they drove off.”
Her telephone did not answer, Tut.by reported.
Kolesnikova’s press aide, Rodnenkov, confirmed her abduction but vanished himself around 40 minutes later, it reported. Kolesnikova’s allies said they were checking the report of her detention. Police in Minsk were cited by Russia’s Interfax news agency as saying they had not detained her.
Before the election, Kolesnikova had joined forces with the opposition presidential candidate Tikhanovskaya who later fled to Lithuania, and with Veronika Tsepkalo, who has also since left the country. Another leading activist, Olga Kovalkova, arrived in Poland on Saturday, saying she had been told she would face arrest if she stayed in Belarus.
Senior Belarus opposition figures have accused the EU of failing to respond to Lukashenko’s brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters. Andrei Sannikov, who stood against Lukashanko in the 2010 presidential election, and was subsequently jailed, said sanctions were urgently needed.
Earlier on Monday, central bank figures showed Belarus had burned through nearly a sixth of its gold and foreign exchange reserves, or $1.4bn (£1.06bn), in August, as it fought to prop up its rouble currency during the wave of unrest.
Kolesnikova had announced on 31 August that she was forming a new political party, Together, with the team of jailed opposition figure Viktor Babariko with whom she had previously worked.
Kolesnikova, a trained flautist and music teacher, got into politics through running the campaign of another opposition politician, the former banker Viktor Babaryko, who attempted to stand for president against Lukashenko but was jailed and barred from running.
When Tikhanovskaya, an English teacher and translator with no political experience, was unexpectedly allowed to run for president, Kolesnikova and Tsepkalo backed her and spoke alongside her at rallies.
The women came up with signature gestures: for Tikhanovskaya a raised fist, for Kolesnikova a heart formed with her fingers, and for Tsepkalo a victory sign.
Kolesnikova and other members of Babaryko’s campaign team last month announced the creation of a new opposition party called Together.
Smoke from the Creek Fire billows beyond a ridge as seen Sept. 5 from Huntington Lake, Calif. (photo: Eric Paul Zamora/Fresno Bee/AP)
California Faces 'Kiln-Like,' Record-Setting Heat as Fires Rage Across State, Causing Injuries
Andrew Freedman, The Washington Post
Freedman writes: "California just witnessed one of its hottest weekends in memory, which intensified destructive wildfires that erupted."
Creek Fire explodes in size, trapping and injuring campers
The scorching temperatures forced the National Weather Service to issue heat alerts for nearly the entire state. Many areas were also under red-flag warnings for high fire danger as the heat worsened blazes already burning and helped fuel new ones.
Numerous locations in California experienced their hottest September day on record Sunday. A few spots saw their highest temperatures ever observed in any month.
Woodland Hills, just 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles, soared to 121 degrees, the highest temperature ever observed in Los Angeles County. Chino, 32 miles east of Los Angeles, also hit 121 degrees. Both the Chino and Woodland Hills marks were the highest ever recorded west of the mountains in Southern California.
Farther north, the mercury in San Luis Obispo, just 10 miles from the Pacific Ocean, reached a sweltering 120 degrees. This may be the highest temperature ever measured so close to the ocean in the Americas. Even downtown San Francisco touched 100 degrees, breaking a record that stood for more than a century.
The blistering heat helped fuel a serious wildfire situation Saturday when the Creek Fire in the Sierra National Forest erupted, about 290 miles north of Los Angeles. The blaze was first detected Friday night and rapidly grew to at least 45,500 acres by Sunday afternoon.
That fire trapped about 1,000 people near Mammoth Pool reservoir as flames crossed the San Joaquin River, including about 150 people who became stranded at a boat launch, the Associated Press reported.
According to the AP, 200 people were rescued from the Mammoth Pool Campground by military helicopters. Two of them were severely injured, 10 had “moderate injuries” and others had minor or no injuries. According to the California Air National Guard, this was the largest wildfire-related air evacuation in recent memory.
The Fresno Bee reported that at one point, people trapped by the flames were told to jump in the water as a last resort should the flames get too close. However, Sierra National Forest officials said the fire burned around the reservoir and the evacuations took place because the blaze blocked evacuation routes.
The Fresno County Sheriff’s Office ordered new evacuations Sunday morning as the fire continued to grow.
The Creek Fire sent smoke, embers and fine particles 45,000 feet in the air Saturday and Sunday, forming a pyrocumulonimbus cloud. Such clouds, which look like explosions from a distance, are fire-driven weather systems. The one seen Saturday was causing lightning to strike areas downwind along with erratic and gusty surface winds. Ash fell more than 10 miles away from the fire.
Fires this weekend are what are known as plume-dominated blazes, which occur when the environment is favorable for the upward billowing of smoke and vertical transfer of heat.
Plume-dominated fires can frequently become firestorms, taking on the structure of a thunderstorm because of their incredible vertical release of heat. Extreme fire behavior, as has been seen with the Creek Fire, is often a characteristic of plume-dominated fires.
The Creek Fire appeared to produce multiple fire tornadoes based on Doppler radar data, which revealed vortices inside the fire and smoke plume that matched the size and shape of tornadoes.
A change of wind speed and direction with height known as wind shear caused the smoke plume to rotate. In an unusual turn of events, the smoke plume’s updraft also appeared to repeatedly split, with pairs of spinning rotations repeatedly forming and drifting away from one another.
The Loyalton Fire in Lassen County, Calif., produced five or more fire tornadoes barely three weeks ago, prompting the National Weather Service to issue a first-of-its-kind fire tornado warning.
In addition to the Creek Fire, firefighters are still battling the second-, third- and fourth-largest fires in state history that erupted during a mid-August heat wave and unusual thunderstorms north of San Francisco. Although those fires are better contained, the heat, dry weather and shifting, strong offshore winds are causing an uptick in their activity.
Since Aug. 15, the state has seen more than 1.6 million acres burned and 900 new fires started, along with eight deaths and nearly 3,300 destroyed structures. In an average California fire season, about 310,000 acres are burned, according to Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency.
Daniel Swain, a climate researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the state may set a record for the “most acres burned in the modern era” as soon as Monday.
Firefighting operations will continue to be extremely challenging because of the triple-digit heat and extremely low humidity levels, according to the Weather Service.
Forecasters are monitoring two periods for strong, desiccating offshore winds to pick up in strength early this week. The first looks as though it could take place Sunday night through Monday evening, with the next taking shape as a rare early-season Santa Ana wind event in Southern California on Tuesday into Wednesday.
The Weather Service’s forecast office in Los Angeles is predicting “elevated to critical fire danger” through Wednesday.
Punishing heat
The Weather Service office in Los Angeles described Sunday’s heat as “kiln-like,” predicting a “dangerous to potentially deadly” extreme heat event.
Ninety-nine percent of the state’s population was under an excessive-heat warning or heat advisory, according to the Weather Service office in Sacramento.
In a sign of the heat to come, temperatures did not drop below the 90s on Saturday night and into early Sunday in some locations from the San Fernando Valley to parts of L.A. County. Two temperature stations in the L.A. area were still hovering above the century mark at 3:02 a.m. local time, the Weather Service said.
High temperatures in Southern California on Sunday ranged from 105 to 115 degrees near the coast to up to 120 degrees in inland areas, which would edge past all-time-high temperature records in some locations.
Some noteworthy temperature records that have already fallen include:
- Burbank, Calif., tied its all-time-high temperature record of 114 degrees on both Saturday and Sunday.
- Palm Springs hit 122 degrees Saturday, breaking its previous September record from 1950.
- Death Valley, Calif., set a September record with a high of 125 degrees, beating the old record of 123, set in 1996. This comes just two weeks after reaching 130 degrees, an August record, and the highest temperature observed globally since at least 1931.
- The 121-degree temperature recorded in Woodland Hills, Calif., on Sunday was both the highest temperature on record there and the highest temperature seen anywhere in Los Angeles, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, the Weather Service said.
The massive heat dome sprawled over western North America established September records from Mexico to the Colorado Rockies. Mexicali, Mexico, soared to 121.1 degrees Saturday, the country’s hottest temperature ever observed during the month. Denver hit 101 degrees Saturday, its highest September temperature and the latest on record it has crossed the century mark. Nearby Boulder hit 99 degrees both Saturday and Sunday, its hottest temperature so late in the year. On Tuesday, Denver and Boulder are expecting snow.
La Junta, Colo., about 60 miles southeast of Pueblo, registered a high of 108 degrees, a state record for the month of September.
Temperatures are forecast to cool some by Tuesday but to remain above normal in most of California for much of the week.
Studies show human-caused climate change is tilting the odds in favor of more frequent, severe and longer-lasting heat waves, as well as larger wildfires throughout large parts of the West. Research published last month, for example, shows climate change is tied to more frequent occurrences of extreme-fire-risk days in parts of California during the fall. (Meteorologists define the fall as beginning Sept. 1.)
Michael Wehner, who researches extreme weather events at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, estimates that “climate change has caused extreme heat waves to be 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in California.” These trends “will continue as the planet continues to warm,” he said in an email, noting that the amount of warming will depend on future greenhouse gas emissions.
The heat wave has prompted warnings from the operator of California’s electricity grid that rolling blackouts may need to be instituted during times of peak power use, and it has asked residents to take steps to reduce electricity use during times of peak demand. A “Stage 2 warning” was issued Saturday and Sunday, indicating that all efforts at outage mitigation had been taken, but it was not followed by outages.
The California ISO declared a “Flex Alert” on Sunday, calling for reduced electricity use between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. local time.
The state utility PG&E has also warned that it may institute rolling outages if winds get too strong early this week, because its power infrastructure has been blamed for sparking some of the state’s largest and deadliest blazes in recent years.
Extreme heat has been the top weather-related killer in the United States during the past 30 years, and combined with poor air quality from nearby fires as well as the coronavirus pandemic, the health threat is particularly acute. Air conditioning provides the best protection from excessive heat, but because of the possibility of exposure to the virus at cooling shelters, the pandemic may keep people who lack air conditioning at home.
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