Before the Los Angeles disaster, wildfires pushed others out of California

Christina Welch still remembers what the sky looked like the day a wildfire broke out 2 miles (3.2 km) from her home in Santa Rosa, California.

It was the Tubbs Fire of 2017, the most destructive in California history at the time. Mrs. Welch’s neighbor woke her up in the morning and told her to get her things and leave. When Mrs. Welch opened the door, ash was falling from the sky and smoke was filling the air.

Then, in 2019, the Kincaid wildfire forced her parents to evacuate for five days.

It was the final push for Ms. Welch. Following a friend’s advice, she packed up and drove across the country to her new hometown: Duluth, Minnesota.

“It was just the culmination of everything,” the 42-year-old said. “There are only so many times that I would go through every fall worrying about what would catch on fire if I was going to lose a house.”

Ms. Welch is one of several people who have fled California in recent years due to weather disasters, even before the most destructive wildfires in Los Angeles’ history killed 25 people this month.

Just this week, a new, fast-growing wildfire broke out in Los Angeles County, northwest of the city, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate a region already reeling from destruction. Trump plans to visit Southern California on Friday to see the devastation of the fires.

Climate experts say they haven’t seen mass migration from the state due to climate change before — and it’s hard to estimate the number of people who have left because of it. However, the state’s population growth rate has continued to decline since 2000. here, according to the US Census.

But scientists and demographic experts say that as climate change-related disasters become more extreme and unpredictable, the number of people leaving the state could increase, leaving some cities unprepared to accommodate new residents.

“There can be this wave of new people saying, ‘You know what? California just isn’t going to work for me because this is the third time in five years that I’ve had to close my doors because of the extreme soot and smoke,” said University of Michigan data science professor Derek Van Berkel.

“We need to start preparing for these events because they will become more frequent and more extreme.

A number of climate-related factors could drive Californians from their homes over the next decade. From 2020 until 2023 wildfires have destroyed more than 15,000 buildings in California, according to CalFire. At least 12,000 buildings were lost in the Los Angeles wildfires that broke out earlier this year.

The country also faces other impacts of climate change, including flooding. Sea-level rise could put half a million Californians in flood-prone areas by 2100, according to the state attorney general’s office.

The state also deals with at least two earthquakes on average each year with a magnitude of 5.5 or greater, according to the California Department of Conservation.

As weather disasters become more extreme and more frequent, home insurance rates in the state also continue to rise. More than 100,000 Californians have lost their home insurance since 2019. ever since, according to an analysis by the San Francisco Chronicle.

The data shows that climate migration is so far more of a local phenomenon, with some moving inland from their home state or even seeking higher ground in their own city to avoid flooding, said Jeremy Porter, head of the Climate implications at First Street, which conducts climate risk modeling.

But, he said, in recent years fewer people have started flocking to cities outside of California that are touted as potential “climate havens.”

Several cities — and media reports — began using the term after climate adaptation researcher Jesse Keenan created a list of places in 2019 that are expected to have a lower risk of extreme weather events, places he calls “reception areas”.

Near the top of the list is Duluth, Minnesota, a former industrial city home to about 90,000 people, a population that is growing slowly as of 2020. after years of stagnation.

One of the city’s attractions is its proximity to the Great Lakes, the series of lakes that make up the largest body of fresh water in the world. About 10% of the US and 30% of Canada rely on lakes for drinking water.

“In a scenario where resources are scarce, this is a huge asset,” Mr Van Berkel said.

The water supply of the Great Lakes lured Jamie Beck Alexander and her family to Duluth. Alarmed by three consecutive seasons of devastating wildfires in California, Ms. Alexander, her husband and two young children piled into a camper and drove across the country to Minnesota in 2020.

Mrs. Alexander has found similarities between the small progressive town and their old town of San Francisco.

“There’s a real depth of connection between people and deep rootedness, things that I think are important for climate resilience,” she said.

Ms. Welch ignored her friends, who thought she was crazy to move to a city known for its record snowfall and icy conditions, with an average of 106 sub-zero days a year. The fresh, beautiful hilltop town became her own, she said.

“There are a lot of people here who love where they live and want to protect it,” Ms. Welch said of Duluth.

While some cities have accepted their designation as climate havens, it remains a challenge for smaller local governments to find the resources to plan for new residents and climate resilience, Mr. Van Berkel said.

Mr. Van Berkel works with Duluth and other cities in the Great Lakes region on climate change planning, including welcoming new residents relocating due to climate change.

The city of Duluth declined to respond to the BBC’s request for comment on how it is preparing to welcome potential climate migrants.

For now, Mr. Porter said the Great Lakes region and other “climate haven” cities are not seeing high levels of migration. But if that changes, many won’t be ready, he said.

“It will require a huge investment in local communities … for those communities to absorb the kind of population that some of the literature on climate migration shows,” Mr Porter said.

In the city of Duluth, for example, housing availability can be a problem, Ms. Alexander said. She said that while the city has space to create new housing, there is currently not enough new construction for the growing population. As a result, in the years since she moved there, she said, housing prices have risen.

And any new housing and other construction must also be done with climate change in mind, Mr. Van Berkel said.

“We don’t want to make missteps that could be very costly with our infrastructure when climate change rears its ugly head,” he said.

In 2024 A Category 4 hurricane destroyed more than 2,000 homes and businesses in Kelsey Lahr’s climate haven of Asheville, North Carolina.

She moved there in 2020, attracted by the city’s warm climate, restaurants and music scene after a series of devastating wildfire and mudslide seasons near her hometown of Santa Barbara, California.

Before moving, Ms. Lahr researched the most climate-resilient places to live, with Asheville ranking near the top because of cooler temperatures and an inland location that protects it from flooding.

But last year, Hurricane Helena tore through western North Carolina, killing more than 100 people in the state and destroying Ms. Lahr’s new hometown of Asheville. Many of them remained without electricity for nearly 20 days and without drinking water for more than a month.

“Apparently the southern Appalachians are not the ‘climate haven’ they were made out to be,” Ms. Lahr said.

In Delut, Ms Alexander said her family had also quickly learned they could not escape climate change.

During their first summer, the city was hit by the same smoke and poor air quality that drove them out of California—this time from wildfires in Canada.

“It was like this really deep joke that the universe played on me,” she said. “Unless we address the root cause (of climate change), we’re always going to feel like we have to get up and move.”

She has since moved to Wisconsin for personal reasons, but says she has no regrets about that first trip to Minnesota. Ms. Lahr also has no regrets about moving to Asheville.

Although Ms. Lahr often missed the ancient forests of California’s Yosemite National Park, where she would spend her summers working as a ranger, a future that could bring more climate disasters demanded sacrifices, she said.

“I think more and more that climate shelters are a myth,” she said. “Everyone has to assess the risk where they live and go from there.