Putting Massive Fires in Context; a Big Lunch-Meat Recall–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: July 29, 2024

Indy Digest: July 29, 2024

A good portion of the West is on fire.

As of this morning, there were 94 “large active wildfires” burning in the United States, according to the National Interagency Fire Center—and that doesn’t even count the Nixon Fire, which started around 12:30 p.m. today in Riverside County, southwest of the Coachella Valley. But none of these fires are larger than what’s being called the Park Fire, in Northern California.

CBS News reports:

A burning car that authorities say was pushed into a gully less than a week ago sparked what is now one of the largest wildfires in California history. As of Monday, officials say the Park Fire has grown to more than 368,000 acres—making it the sixth-largest ever in the state. 

In CalFire’s latest update Monday morning, officials said the Park Fire had grown to 368,256 acres and was at 12% containment. That size—about 575 square miles—is almost half the size of Rhode Island, more than 12 times bigger than San Francisco County and slightly larger than the city of Los Angeles.

According to CalFire, the Park Fire now ranks between the Creek Fire of 2020, which burned 379,895 acres, and the LNU Lightning Complex Fire of the same year that burned 363,220 acres. The August Complex Fire, also in 2020, remains the largest in state history at more than 1 million acres burned.

The story, which was last updated late this morning, goes on to say: “More than 100 structures have been destroyed, officials said. More than 4,000 other buildings remain threatened by the fire, which has not caused any known injuries or fatalities to civilians or firefighters so far, according to officials.”

That number of acres burned so far—368,000—is huge … and human beings tend to have a problem with big numbers.

NPR explained this problem in a piece earlier this year:

“Our brains are evolutionarily very old and we are pushing them to do things that we’ve only just recently conceptualized,” says (educational neuroscientist Elizabeth) Toomarian.

Instead, the human brain is built to understand how much of something is in its environment. For example, which bush has more berries or how many predators are in that clearing?

But comprehending the national debt or imagining the size of our universe? “We certainly can use our brains in that way, but we’re recycling these sort of evolutionarily old brain architectures to do something really new,” she says. In other words, it’s not our fault that we have trouble wrapping our heads around big numbers. …

Our brains are fairly good at determining how many of something is in our environment–as long as that number is low, at a maximum of about four or maybe five objects. Beyond that, people make more mistakes. “We’re really processing [numbers past four or even five] in a totally different way. We actually might even be using a different brain system altogether,” says Toomarian.

In order to help our brains understand the size of the Park Fire (although that CBS News piece did a good job using words to help), our friends at Calmatters have created a very cool map-overlay tool: You can type in an address, and the tool will produce a map with that address in the center, and the fire’s outline on top of it. Since the main College of the Desert campus is more or less in the middle of the Coachella Valley, I put in that address (43500 Monterey Ave.)—and the resulting map shows that this fire’s burn area is actually larger than the populated portions of the Coachella Valley:

So, yeah. Big.

And remember: This is just one of 94-plus wildfires burning in the country. This is officially a bad fire season.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• Former President Trump made yet another disconcerting statement on Friday about his plans should be be re-elected. The Washington Post explains: “At the conclusion of his speech at the Believers Summit in West Palm Beach, Fla., Trump said, ‘Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. … You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.’’ Democrats and others interpreted the comments as signaling how a second Trump presidency would be run, a reminder that he previously said he would not be a dictator upon returning to office ‘except for Day One.’ … The Trump campaign, however, says the comments, made at the event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action, were about how Trump would unite the country. Asked to clarify what Trump meant, Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the campaign, said in a statement on Saturday that the former president ‘was talking about uniting this country and bringing prosperity to every American, as opposed to the divisive political environment that has sowed so much division and even resulted in an assassination attempt.’”

• CNN examines a movement to inundate registrars with voter-rolls challenges, regardless of whether or not those challenges are legit: “Police officers in Texas, senior citizens at a nursing home in Pennsylvania and people who had registered to vote at a Marine base in California. They are among the thousands of voters whose right to cast a ballot has been needlessly challenged ahead of this November’s election by activists—many of whom have been inspired by conspiracy theories—seeking to prevent voter fraud. ‘My simple right as a voter is being attacked,’ said Daniel Moss, a university administrator from Denton County, Texas, whose registration was challenged by one of the activists even though he has lived in the county and voted there for about two decades. ‘It’s kind of un-American to do that.’ Election officials across the country have been inundated with dubious complaints about inaccurate voter rolls, which have wasted government resources and sapped taxpayer money spent reviewing lists of registered voters that officials say are already carefully maintained, a CNN investigation has found. One of the main drivers of the fruitless challenges is a conservative Texas-based nonprofit group called True the Vote, an election-monitoring organization that has long peddled debunked voter-fraud theories. The group’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, has called on followers to help clean voter rolls by using an app called IV3 that enables users to research voter data and submit voter-eligibility challenges to local election offices.”

• COVID-19 cases continue to rise in California—and aren’t showing signs of decreasing anytime soon. The Los Angeles Times says: “This latest surge is being fueled in large part by the FLiRT variants — a collection of highly transmissible sibling strains that have out-muscled last winter’s dominant strain, JN.1. In particular, one of the FLiRT strains, known as KP.3.1.1, ‘has really taken off,’ (said Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious disease at Kaiser Permanente Southern California). The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that that strain accounted for 17.7% of coronavirus samples nationwide for the two-week period that ended July 20, up from 6.8% for the prior comparable period. At that rate of growth, that strain is likely to become increasingly dominant in the next few weeks, Hudson said. ‘So, unfortunately, I think we are going to see a lot more cases.’ … For the seven-day period that ended July 20, the most recent data available, coronavirus levels in California wastewater were at 93% of the peak from the summer of 2022. They’ve already exceeded last summer’s height.”

• Today’s recall news involves … liverwurst! CNN explains: “The company Boar’s Head has recalled ready-to-eat liverwurst products and some other deli meat products due to concerns that they may be contaminated with listeria. The US Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service announced Friday that the company is recalling about 207,528 pounds of products. The agency is conducting further tests to determine if the products may be related to an ongoing, multistate listeria outbreak that has killed two people. That outbreak has been linked with sliced deli meat. … The ready-to-eat liverwurst products that Boar’s Head is recalling were produced between June 11 and July 17 and have a 44-day shelf life. The loaves of meat contain ‘Boar’s Head Strassburger Brand Liverwurst MADE IN VIRGINIA,’ and the products bear ‘sell by’ dates ranging from July 25 to Aug. 30, printed on the side of their packaging. The other recalled ready-to-eat deli meat products were produced on June 27, and include certain ham, bologna, beef salami and roasted bacon products. The products subject to recall were distributed to retail deli locations across the United States, and the products shipped to deli retailers have the establishment number ‘EST. 12612’ inside the USDA mark of inspection on their labels.”

• And … Toyotas! Car and Driver offers an update: “Toyota and Lexus are biting the bullet and replacing roughly 100,000 engines for owners of certain Tundra pickups and LX SUVs from the 2022 and 2023 model years. The replacement engines are necessary due to a recall issued in May caused by machining debris left in the engine during the manufacturing process. While the company had not figured out a fix at the time of the recall, an updated statement from Toyota on July 25 confirmed that Toyota’s solution is a simple one: Replace the whole dang thing. The full recall population includes 102,092 vehicles—98,568 Tundras and 3,524 LX600s.”

• And finally … congrats to the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, because Time magazine has named the Agua Caliente Cultural Plaza—the subject of our July 2024 print-edition cover story—as one of the World’s Greatest Places 2024. Here’s the Time write-up. A snippet: “Taken altogether, the plaza serves as an invitation to honor the original inhabitants of the famed destination. ‘This is our story, in our own voice,’ says tribal chairman Reid Milanovich. ‘We are here today, just like we have been since time immemorial.’“

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