Fires

Dispatch: Through The Fire

January 26, 2025 Carlos Sirah, Black Agenda Report. Organize! Black America, California, climate crisis, Extreme weather, Fires, Mutual Aid

Unprecedented January wildfires devastate Los Angeles, as communities face both natural disaster and militarized state response. The Eaton Fire displaces numerous families in the Pasadena-Altadena area, including multigenerational Black households who have built lives in these neighborhoods for decades. Among them, the Edwards family stands displaced from their home of 32 years. For those seeking to support impacted community members, the Edwards family’s GoFundMe, provides direct aid to one of many displaced households fighting to survive. A broader directory of displaced Black families seeking support can be found here.

Negligent Landlords Strike Again In The Bronx

January 11, 2025 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. Educate! Fires, Landlords, New York City (NYC), Tenant Rights

A massive, five-alarm fire broke out in the Bronx on Friday morning, displacing over 200 people out in the below freezing temperatures, and injuring seven people. At the time of publication, New York City firefighters are still battling the massive blaze that engulfed the top floor of a six-story residential building. Over 81 displaced families are sheltering in a nearby school, and all the apartments on the top floor have been destroyed. For the short term, displaced residents will be placed in hotels, then will meet with caseworkers who will help move them into one of the city’s shelters.

‘Weather Whiplash’ Is Fueling The Los Angeles Fires

January 10, 2025 Kate Yoder, Grist. Educate! California, climate crisis, Extreme weather, Fires, Los Angeles

It’s supposed to be the rainy season in Southern California, but the last time Los Angeles measured more than a tenth-inch of rain was eight months ago, after the city logged one of the soggiest periods in its recorded history. Since then, bone-dry conditions have set the stage for the catastrophic wildfires now descending upon the metropolis from multiple directions. This quick cycling between very wet and very dry periods — one example of what scientists have come to call “weather whiplash” — creates prime conditions for wildfires: The rain encourages an abundance of brush and grass, and once all that vegetation dries out, it only takes a spark and a gust of wind to fuel a deadly fire.

Fire Reveals How Oil Industry Environmental ‘Solution’ Spurs Climate Crisis

August 14, 2024 Sharon Kelly, DeSmog. Educate! Carbon Capture, climate crisis, Energy, False Solutions, Fires, Oil and Gas

The trouble began at Piñon Midstream’s Dark Horse Treating Plant in Jal, New Mexico, on November 25, 2023, with an unexpected loud “pop” in the early afternoon, the company would later tell state regulators. A poisonous mix of flammable gasses hissed out from a pipeline feeding into the plant. Within a minute, a worker radioed in to the plant’s control room that a dense cloud of vapor had enveloped part of the plant. Within two minutes, Dark Horse was ablaze in what the company would later call an “intense and sustained fire.” Within 15 minutes, more pipes ripped open, and a towering fireball tore through the plant.

While Lahaina Is Destroyed, Honolulu To Construct $60 Million Bridge

September 14, 2023 Ann Wright, Popular Resistance. Educate! colonization, Federal funding, Fires, Hawaii, Infrastructure, Maui

While the island of Maui faces the rebuilding of over 2200 structures in Lahaina and 18 structures in upcountry Kula, on the neighboring island of Oahu, the City and County of Honolulu is going ahead to spend $25 million in federal funds for an unnecessary and controversial pedestrian bridge across the Ala Wai canal. The canal seperates the hotels and condos of Waikiki from the residential area across the canal. In the spirit of Aloha, I suggest that our Honolulu elected officials give the $25 million in Federal funds allocated for the non-essential Ala Wai bridge to Maui for the reconstruction of Lahaina.

Three Amazon Warehouses Catch Fire; Workers Protest Unsafe Conditions

October 11, 2022 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. Resist! Amazon, Fires, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Amazon warehouses caught fire in New York and Alabama this past week, endangering hundreds of workers. In the unionized Staten Island facility, workers marched on managers and staged a sit-down in protest over Amazon’s disregard for their safety—and the company lashed back with mass suspensions. The HSV1 fulfillment center in Madison, a suburb of Huntsville in northern Alabama, caught fire Monday evening, October 3, for a second time in two weeks. “Our plant caught on fire again,” an Amazon worker at the HSV1 told WAFF. “This time it was in the same area, but it was a couple aisles over. You could still smell smoke in there. Half the warehouse was off limits.” That same day, another fire broke out, this one in a cardboard compactor on a shipping dock at the Staten Island fulfillment center JFK8—the same one where, in April, workers won the first-ever unionized Amazon warehouse in the country.

Ten Days Of Climate Extremes

August 31, 2020 Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News. Educate! climate crisis, Drought, extreme heat, Fires, Flood, Hurricane, Tropical Storms

Pick almost any slice of time in the recent past and you can find clues to how climate change is jacking up dangerous weather extremes. In the 10 days after the potential global heat record in Death Valley, an unusual lightning storm blasted California with more than 11,000 lightning strikes that sparked hundreds of fires; more heat records were set in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres; unprecedented flooding in Asia washed away villages and threatened China's Three Gorges Dam; and twin hurricanes threatened the Gulf of Mexico, with Hurricane Laura generating a storm surge as high as 11 feet that pushed far inland along the Texas and Louisiana coast.

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