The California assemblyman Jim Wood spent most of the past week in the Sacramento morgue, analyzing the charred remains of human teeth. Wood is a forensic-dentistry expert, and has worked on some of the nation’s most tragic events, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Since his election to the State Assembly, in 2014—representing an enormous district that stretches from Santa Rosa, in wine country, north to the Oregon border—his forensics work has been closer to home. In 2017, after the Tubbs Fire, in Sonoma County, which was, until now, the state’s deadliest fire, he was the sole dental-forensics expert on hand, and helped identify some of the twenty-two fatalities. For the Camp Fire, which began on November 8th and became the deadliest and most destructive fire in California’s history, he recruited a team of four others. “The numbers are so high, the conditions of the remains so fragmented, and the lack of before-death records is creating a real, real challenge,” he told me. “There may be some people who are never identified.” Of the eighty-five fatalities, twenty-seven have been identified, thanks in part to the work of Wood’s team. The body count will likely continue to increase; two hundred and ninety-six people are still missing. “With this one,” he told me, “the numbers of missing are not dropping as rapidly as they did in Sonoma, and I find that to be really troubling.”
Wood’s proximity to tragedy has influenced his work in the legislature. Earlier this year, he was part of a committee that crafted Senate Bill 901, which set aside a billion dollars for wildfire-prevention-and-safety efforts over the next five years. The money will come from California’s cap-and-trade program, which auctions off allowances to greenhouse-gas emitters each quarter. “These fires emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases,” Wood told me. “All the other efforts we do to diminish greenhouse gases through regulations for cars, trucks, and businesses get wiped out by these fires. We spend billions of dollars on those efforts. So why are we not spending even modest amounts of money on this, which is undoing all our good work?” Until the most recent budget, only about two per cent of the money from greenhouse-gas reductions was going to forestry management. Much of the rest goes to projects that are focussed on advanced technologies such as hydrogen-fuel cells, high-speed rail, and renewable-energy development. By comparison, getting funds for disaster prevention and vegetation management in rural areas is difficult. “Ninety-five per cent of the land mass is occupied by five per cent of the population,” Wood said. “So we fight hard for every dollar we can get.”
Discussions on the bill began late last year, shortly after the Sonoma wildfires were put out. The elements to get it passed all seemed present: the state is rich, and the legislature, which has a Democratic majority, largely agrees that climate change is driving the increasing rate of large wildfires. In addition to dramatically reducing carbon emissions, the state needs to help communities bear the economic burden of previous fires and better prepare for future wildfires, which will not only inevitably occur but will grow even more extreme as the climate gets warmer and drier. And yet, as the months passed, the arguments over the bill’s details only multiplied. (One legislator said that there was “no issue that was as intense.”) In order to get the prevention-and-safety funding, the bill ultimately required many legislators to make a substantial compromise that allowed the state’s utilities, specifically Pacific Gas and Electric, which dominates northern California, to shift some of their wildfire-liability costs from shareholders to ratepayers. (Wildfires are sometimes started, or exacerbated, by sparks from utility poles and wires.) The bill finally passed on August 31st, at the very end of the summer legislative session, with eleventh-hour edits and late additions that most legislators had little time to review. “I got a little impatient,” Wood said. “People are dying. I don’t want us to see, five years from now, millions and millions more acres burned and untold numbers of more people dead.”
[For more on this story by Carolyn Kormann, go to https://www.newyorker.com/news...nge#nws=mcnewsletter]
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