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How the 1% are preparing for the apocalypse.
The threat of global annihilation may feel as present as it did during the Cold War, but today's high-security shelters could not be more different from their 20th-century counterparts.
Say "doomsday bunker" and most people would imagine a concrete room filled with cots and canned goods.
The threat of global annihilation may feel as present as it did during the Cold War, but today's high-security shelters could not be more different from their 20th-century counterparts.
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A number of companies around the world are meeting a growing demand for structures that protect from any risk, whether it's a global pandemic, an asteroid, or World War III -- while also delivering luxurious amenities.
"Your father or grandfather's bunker was not very comfortable," says Robert Vicino, a real estate entrepreneur and CEO of Vivos, a company he founded that builds and manages high-end shelters around the world.
"They were gray. They were metal, like a ship or something military. And the truth is mankind cannot survive long-term in such a Spartan, bleak environment."
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The Oppidum, Czech Republic
The Oppidum, Czech Republic
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The demand for designer bunkers has grown rapidly in recent years. Credit: the oppidum
Doomsday demand
Many of the world's elite, including hedge fund managers, sports stars and tech executives (Bill Gates is rumored to have bunkers at all his properties) have chosen to design their own secret shelters to house their families and staff.
Gary Lynch, general manager of Texas-based Rising S Company, says 2016 sales for their custom high-end underground bunkers grew 700% compared to 2015, while overall sales have grown 300% since the November US presidential election alone.
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Apocalypse now: Our incessant desire to picture the end of the world
The company's plate steel bunkers, which are designed to last for generations, can hold a minimum of one year's worth of food per resident and withstand earthquakes.
But while some want to bunker down alone, others prefer to ride out the apocalypse in a community setting that offers an experience a bit closer to the real world.
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A secret bunker in South-East London, built to protect key government employees during a nuclear winter, has been transformed into a $4 million luxury residence. Credit: JDM estate agents
Developers of community shelters like these often acquire decommissioned military bunkers and missile silos built by the United States or Soviet governments -- sites that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build today.
The fortified structures are designed to withstand a nuclear strike and come equipped with power systems, water purification systems, blast valves, and Nuclear-Biological-Chemical (NBC) air filtration.
Most include food supplies for a year or more, and many have hydroponic gardens to supplement the rations. The developers also work to create well-rounded communities with a range of skills necessary for long-term survival, from doctors to teachers.
Vicino says Vivos received a flurry of interest in its shelters around the 2016 election from both liberals and conservatives, and completely sold out of spaces in its community shelters in the past few weeks.
Designer ark
One of those shelters, Vivos xPoint, is near the Black Hills of South Dakota, and consists of 575 military bunkers that served as an Army Munitions Depot until 1967.
Presently being converted into a facility that will accommodate about 5,000 people, the interiors of each bunker are outfitted by the owners at a cost of between $25,000 to $200,000 each. The price depends on whether they want a minimalist space or a home with high-end finishes.
The compound itself will be equipped with all the comforts of a small town, including a community theater, classrooms, hydroponic gardens, a medical clinic, a spa and a gym.
Vivos Europa One in Germany
Vivos Europa One in Germany Credit: © Copyright Terravivos.com
For clients looking for something further afield and more luxurious, the company also offers Vivos Europa One, billed as a "modern day Noah's Ark" in a former Cold War-era munitions storage facility in Germany.
The structure, which was carved out of solid bedrock, offers 34 private residences, each starting at 2,500 square feet, with the option to add a second story for a total of 5,000 square feet.
Stunning mural appears in secret forest
The units will be delivered empty and each owner will have the space renovated to suit their own tastes and needs, choosing from options that include screening rooms, private pools and gyms.
Vicino compares the individual spaces to underground yachts, and even recommends that owners commission the same builders and designers that worked on their actual vessels.
"Most of these people have high-end yachts, so they already have the relationship and they know the taste, fit, and finish that they want," he explains.
The vast complex includes a tram system to transport residents throughout the shelter, where they can visit its restaurants, theater, coffee shops, pool and game areas.
"We have all the comforts of home, but also the comforts that you expect when you leave your home," Vicino adds.
Survival Condo in Kansas
Survival Condo in Kansas Credit: Courtesy of Survival Condo
Nuclear hardened homes
Developer Larry Hall's Survival Condo in Kansas utilizes two abandoned Atlas missile silos built by the US Army Corps of Engineers to house warheads during the early 1960s.
Super-rich building luxury doomsday bunkers
"Our clients are sold on the unique advantage of having a luxury second home that also happens to be a nuclear hardened bunker," says Hall, who is already starting work on a second Survival Condo in another silo on site.
"This aspect allows our clients to invest in an appreciating asset as opposed to an expense."
The Survival Condo has several different layouts, from a 900-square-foot half-floor residence to a two-level, 3,600-square-foot penthouse that starts at $4.5 million.
Owners have access to their homes and the facilities at anytime, whether a disaster is imminent or they just want to get away from it all, and the complex features a pool, general store, theater, bar and library.
The condo association sets the rules for the community, and during an emergency, owners would be required to work four hours a day.
Long-term luxury
If you prefer to spend the end of days solo, or at least with hand-selected family and friends, you may prefer to consider The Oppidum in the Czech Republic, which is being billed as "the largest billionaire bunker in the world."
The top-secret facility, once a joint project between the former Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), was built over 10 years beginning in 1984.
An interior shot of the Oppidum in Czech Republic
An interior shot of the Oppidum in Czech Republic Credit: Courtesy of the Oppidum
The site now includes both an above-ground estate and a 77,000-square-foot underground component. While the final product will be built out to the owner's specifications, the initial renderings include an underground garden, swimming pool, spa, cinema and wine vault.
While many might see the luxury amenities at these facilities as unnecessary, the developers argue that these features are critical to survival.
"These shelters are long-term, a year or more," Vicino says. "It had better be comfortable."
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California fires leave 31 dead, a vast landscape charred, and a sky full of soot.
The reach of the blazes is spreading dramatically further by the day, as thick plumes of smoke blow through population centers across the Bay Area.
SONOMA, Calif. — Some of the worst wildfires ever to tear through California have killed 31 people and torched a vast area of the state’s north this week, but the reach of the blazes is spreading dramatically further by the day, as thick plumes of smoke blow through population centers across the Bay Area.
Everything now smells burnt. Hills and buildings are covered in a haze. Residents nowhere near the front lines of the fires now venture out wearing air masks. On a hillside above the Russian River, a broad and menacing band of fire is turning a blue sky into a gray miasma of soot.
Air-quality, based on levels of tiny particles that can flow deep into the lungs, is rated “unhealthy” across much of Northern California, and smoke has traveled as far as Fresno, more than 200 miles to the south. The effects are many: schoolchildren are being kept inside during recess, the Oakland Raiders canceled their outdoor practice on Thursday to prevent players from breathing in the bad air, and doctors are reporting an increase in visits and calls from people with lung and heart trouble.
It is the 31 deaths, however, a toll that surpasses the official number of people killed by the single deadliest wildfire in state history, that has horrified Californians. The Griffith Park fire of 1933, in Los Angeles, killed 29 people despite burning a mere 47 acres, according to officials.
Late Thursday, the authorities said they had identified 10 of 17 people who were killed in Sonoma County. Most were in their 70s and 80s, and most were found in houses. One was found next to a vehicle.
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“We have found bodies that were nothing more than ash and bones,” said Robert Giordano, the Sonoma County sheriff. In some cases, he said, the only way to identify the victims was by the serial numbers stamped on artificial joints and other medical devices that were in their bodies.
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William Roman, 13, wore a face mask as he watered plants in Santa Rosa. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Because the fires have sent so many residents scrambling for safety, separating them from relatives, the authorities have received reports of 900 missing people and have deployed 30 detectives to track them down. Officials said they had confirmed the locations and safety of 437 people and were still looking for the other 463.
If they cannot find them by phone or online, they send search and rescue teams with cadaver dogs to the homes — if the homes are accessible, which in many cases, they still are not.
“It’s going to be a slow process,” Sheriff Giordano said.
Statewide, there were 21 major fires still burning on Thursday, which had consumed more than 191,000 acres since the outbreak began on Sunday night, said Ken Pimlott, the chief of Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency. The number of separate fires rises and falls often, as new blazes flare up and old ones merge, but the size of the devastated area has grown steadily.
Underscoring the vast scale of the crisis, a line of fire that appeared to span at least two miles descended into Alexander Valley, a wine grape growing region in Geyserville along the Russian River. Thick white columns of smoke poured from the forested hillside above the vineyards as the fire crept down into the valley.
Health officials were particularly focused on young children, who are at a higher risk than adults from dirty air. They breathe faster and take in more air than adults because they run around more. They also have smaller airways, so irritation in those narrower pipes is more prone to cause breathing trouble.
“People with pre-existing heart and lung disease, the elderly and young children should stay in the house with the windows closed,” said Dr. John Balmes, an expert on the respiratory effects of air pollutants at the University of California, in both Berkeley and San Francisco.
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Firefighters in Sonoma looked at a wall of smoke rising from the Norrbom Fire burning across the valley. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Certain masks can filter out fine particles, but surgical masks are useless, and so are the ones used to protect against big particles. The masks that work are a type called N95, available in many hardware stores.
Nancy Barkley, 40, a nurse from Indiana who is on a 13-week assignment unrelated to the fire emergency, drove dozens of miles from Santa Rosa to find face masks.
“I kept on driving because they were out everywhere,” she said, pulling down her surgical mask to talk.
Northern California is accustomed to wildfires and occasional wafts of smoke that drift with the winds. But nothing like this.
“I’ve lived here 50 years — I’ve never seen it this bad,” said Paul Ackerley, a 90-year-old World War II veteran.
Mr. Ackerley was walking through his neighborhood Wednesday when a woman stopped her car and offered him a mask.
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Smoke hung in the air in Sonoma’s town square on Thursday. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
People closest to the fires have the greatest risk of health problems. There, heavy smoke can include toxic substances emitted when man-made materials burn. Plastics can release hydrochloric acid and cyanide.
“Smoke inhalation can kill you,” Dr. Balmes said. “There’s no doubt about that, but it’s all dose-related. If you breathe in a lot of smoke from any fire, especially a fire in a building with man-made materials that can emit these toxins, you basically have chemical burns of the airway.
“Just like your skin can slough off when it’s burned, the airway lining can slough off. It can be life-threatening. People have to be intubated and put on a ventilator,” he said.
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Hospitals near the worst fires are struggling as they continue to take in patients.
At Santa Rosa Memorial, the city’s largest hospital, technicians installed a large air filtration system to clear smoky air from the hospital lobby. The hospital has handled 130 fire-related cases since Sunday night, when the fires began. Bus drivers in the city have been issued face masks.
“We’ve seen patients who have chronic lung disease, like emphysema, generally older patients, which is really exacerbated by the smoke,” said Dr. Chad Krilich, chief medical officer for St. Joseph Health, which includes Santa Rosa Memorial, another hospital and other facilities in Sonoma County.
“For some of them, it’s really life-threatening,” he said, adding that patients even without asthma or other lung problems are coming in with breathing trouble. Most are being treated in the emergency rooms, which would normally see 105 to 135 patients a day, but are now seeing 150 to 180 a day.
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Capt. John Clays lit a backfire on Wednesday in Sonoma County. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Their inpatient count rose at first, but they have been transferring patients elsewhere, “because we are at risk of evacuation, too,” Dr. Krilich said, adding, “We know at least 108 of our employees are homeless, and 46 others have had to evacuate.”
Steve Huddleston, vice president for public affairs of NorthBay Healthcare, said the network has two small hospitals and three outpatient clinics in Solano County, east of the fires. One of its outpatient clinics is less than a mile from the fire line, but still operating.
In the emergency rooms and the clinics, he said, “we’re seeing 100 patients a day with respiratory distress and asthmatic attacks from the smoke.”
Many have chronic lung disease or asthma, but not all.
“All of our beds are full, and they have been for two days,” Mr. Huddleston said.
He added: “We’re on the edge of feeling overwhelmed. The staffing is becoming challenging. We’ve had half a dozen of our physicians or staff members lose their homes in the fires. We have staff members who live in the evacuation zones, and they’re trying to get their belongings and their loved ones out of there.”
In areas directly affected by the fires, many schools have canceled classes for the week, leaving parents scrambling.
On Thursday, William Roman, 13, a middle-school student, was helping his grandfather in a landscaping job at a strip mall in Santa Rosa, watering plants — with a face mask on.
“If we’re going to play outside we need to wear a face mask — that’s what my mother says,” William said.
Depending on the winds, the smoke can range from heavy to none. In parts of Santa Rosa on Thursday, there was something resembling a blue sky. Yet even when the smoke was not visible, the outdoors smelled like a fireplace.
Thomas Fuller reported from Sonoma, Calif., and Denise Grady and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Matt Stevens contributed reporting from New York.
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Napa fires make San Francisco air worse than Beijing, causing a run on masks.
Home Depot is sold out of face masks, people sleeping in shelters have bandanas tied around their faces.
NAPA, Calif. — Home Depot is sold out of face masks, people sleeping in shelters have bandanas tied around their faces and residents even 50 miles away from the fires in northern California find themselves coughing and hacking as smoke and haze blanket the area.
The air quality index for San Francisco, Silicon Valley and the area around the fires was predicted to hit 180 on Thursday, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, or nearly five times what's considered safe.
That's even worse than famously polluted Beijing, whose southern suburbs were measured at 154 on Thursday by the U.S. embassy there.
"The federal (safe) standard is 35," said John Balmes,a professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco and expert on environmental health.
Residents who signed up for alerts from local authorities were barraged with air quality health advisories and Spare-the-Air alerts. Schools cancelled recess, teams cut sports practices and parents received notices that weekend football and soccer games might not be held.
The air quality level has been in the "unhealthy" to "very unhealthy" range since the fires began early Monday morning and is expected to stay bad as long as they continue. Wind and geography mean that the haze-affected area extends well beyond the towns where the fires are burning, putting millions of people in harm's way.
"It's smoke, it's particulate matter, it's even toxins from burning plastics and homes. All have very irritating qualities. People will have stinging eyes, trouble breathing, scratching throats and running noses," said Catherine Forest, a physician and expert on environmental toxins at Stanford Health Care in Palo Alto, Calif.
The levels of small particulate matter reported near the fires and further south around San Francisco are especially dangerous for those with pre-existing lung and heart disease, such as asthma, COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) and any kind of heart disease.
The best advice is to simply stay indoors with the windows shut and air conditioning or heaters set to recirculate air, said Forest.
"Don't go out if you can avoid it, don't exercise if you can avoid it. Keep the elderly, small children and anyone with heart or lung disease inside," she said.
But for the hundreds of thousands of people who have to go about their daily work, not to mention the tens of thousands in the fire area, that's impossible advice to follow.
A mask, but not just any mask
For them, the best bet is to wear a face mask. But it's got to be an OSHA-certified N95 particulate filtering mask.
"Not the flat hospital-type masks people sometimes wear. Those are worse than useless because they give you a false sense of security" and don't filter out the most dangerous small particles, said Forest.
The N95 masks have been in short supply in the Bay area due to the fires. At a Home Depot in Fairfield, Calif., where a fire was burning north of town and some areas were under evacuation watch, a steady stream of customers came in looking for masks. But the shelf was bare.
One man asked a Home Depot staffer if there were any left and when he was told no, asked if he could buy the one hanging around the staffer's neck.
"You're not the first guy who's offered that," said the staffer, who declined both to sell the mask and to give his name.
At an Orchard Supply Hardware in Berkeley, Calif., a woman answered the phone, "Good morning Orchard Supply, we are sold out of all masks, how may I help you?" The store was working on getting an emergency truckload of masks.
Johnston Medical, also in Berkeley, was one of the few stores that still had some of the masks recommended by the CDC on hand. Clerks scrambled to help shoppers find masks in picked-over boxes. After hanging up from yet another call, one clerk turned to the other: "Guess what they wanted?"
The empty shelves are only very local, unlike other times, said Balmes. During the global SARS outbreak in 2012 there was a global shortage.
"The Chinese were buying them all up," said Balmes.
When people do find the masks, there are tricks to making them as effective as possible. First is to get the right size. While hardware stores typically only sell the large size of the masks, they actually come in three sizes, small medium and large. Try medical supply stories for the smaller sizes that tend to work better for women and children, experts suggest.
Then bend the flexible metal strip at the top of the mask so that it fits the curve of the nose, to get it the tightest possible.
"They have to seal around, like a snorkel mask," said Balmes.
Such masks are commonly worn by people in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where residents live with dangerous air quality for much of the year. By Thursday, they were becoming a regular sight on the streets in Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino.
For those in their cars, the best advice is to keep the windows rolled up and put the air system on recirculate rather than having fresh air come in from the outside.
"You can run the heater or the air conditioner, as long as you've got it on recirculate," said Balmes.
Overall, the poor air quality shouldn't pose a long term threat to healthy individuals as long as it doesn't last more than another few days, say the experts.
Healthy lungs are remarkably self-cleaning, said Forest. They’re lined with mucus-coated, hair-like projections called cilia. The mucus catches the tiny particles that we breath in and then the waving, beating motion of the cillium moves them up and out of the lungs.
“It’s kind of like a little escalator. It carries it up out of your lungs and you either swallow or cough it out. Either is fine,” she said.
HEPA filters
Another option is to run a home air filter. As long as it’s got a HEPA (high efficiency particulate air) filter can catch most, though not all, fine particles, defined as 2.5 microns in diameter or less, which can irritate lungs.
“They’re so small you can’t see them, but they’ll make you cough,” said Baumes.
The trick with HEPA filters is to change the filters, said Forest. You can’t just buy them and run them forever without putting in a new filter, "or they end up not doing anything at all," Forest said.
Contributing: Jessica Guynn, from Berkeley, Calif.
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Fall armyworm arrives in Africa on the heels of climate change.
A rapidly spreading invasive pest now threatens crops across the continent.
Tobias Okwara is a farmer in Kayoro Parish in southeastern Uganda. In the midst of a long drought that began in May 2016, he and his neighbors got together to discuss what to do. Food was becoming scarce, and they hoped to recover quickly once the rains started again. They decided they would pool their meagre resources and plant a large communal field of maize. By spring 2017, the rains had finally returned, and their maize was thriving.
Then the fall armyworm appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Larvae of the nondescript gray moths hatched and ate their way through the field of young corn.
Endemic to North and South America, the fall armyworm was first spotted in January 2016 in Nigeria. No one knows for certain how it arrived on the African continent, but since its initial appearance the pest has spread to more than 28 countries, including South Africa, Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and most recently, Sudan and Mali. As it has spread, it has destroyed more than 740,000 acres of maize, the staple food for more than 200 million Africans.
The fall armyworm is closely related to the African armyworm, which is native to the continent. Both pests feed not just on corn, but also on other cereal crops like rice, sorghum, and wheat. Kenneth Wilson of Lancaster University has studied the African armyworm for 25 years and is now part of a working group with the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization that is examining how to deal with the newly arrived pest.
Wilson says that while the African armyworm has long been a problem, it typically attacks one area and then moves on to another, making it only a sporadic threat to crop production in any given location. Not so with the fall armyworm. Once it has eaten its way through the cereal crops in a particular area, it sticks around to see what else it can eat. “If you’re a smallholder farmer who plants a little bit of maize, some sorghum, some beans, some tomatoes,” Wilson says, “all of those crops are potentially at risk from the fall armyworm.” It’s been known to feed on at least 80 plant species. In Uganda, over 40 percent of the crops are infested.
Uganda, like much of the rest of Africa, is already reeling from the effects of climate change.
Erratic weather patterns and intensifying cycles of drought and rain have taken a heavy toll on subsistence farmers like Okwara, who have no alternate food supply when it rains too much or too little and crops fail. The fall armyworm comes at a time when farmers throughout rural Africa are grappling with rising food insecurity because of climatic changes.
Climate change may also be a factor in the fall armyworm’s rapid spread across the continent. Wilson says that while it’s too early to know for sure about the new pest, 50 plus years of data on the native African armyworm show that the population explodes after periods of drought. He thinks it’s possible that the intensifying droughts brought on by climate change may favor both varieties of armyworm.
In South America, where the fall armyworm has plagued crops for decades, farmers have used a combination of genetically modified crops and pesticides to keep it mostly in check. But this is an expensive and ecologically damaging approach that Wilson does not think is viable for the majority of farmers in Africa. For one thing, he says, “we know that resistance is developing already both to GM crops and pesticides.”
Wilson specializes in biological pesticides, which are developed from bacteria, baculoviruses, and fungi that naturally prey on pests. He has already identified a virus that kills the African armyworm, but to his frustration it doesn’t kill the fall armyworm. Wilson is currently testing a range of biopesticides to see if there are any commercially available products that could work as a short term alternative to the chemical pesticides that African governments are relying on to address infestations.
As for the long term? Wilson points to parts of Central America, where the fall armyworm hasn’t been as big of a problem. “Farmers there say that it’s because they’ve got good integrated pest management practices. They fertilize the soil with organic fertilizer, they painstakingly search their crops for eggs, they’ve got mixed vegetation, like flowering plants that help to foster natural enemies.”
Such an effort will take time and significant outside investment. Fortunately, Wilson thinks countries outside of Africa are taking the threat seriously. It’s only a matter of time, he says, before the fall armyworm makes its way to Yemen and southern Europe. “For Europe and Asia, there should be an element of self-interest. It’s a global problem. It’s going to be everywhere.”
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Africa tops global hunger index, driven by war and climate shocks.
Global hunger has fallen more than a quarter since 2000, but conflict and climate shocks are beginning to reverse these gains, an annual global hunger index said on Thursday.
Women, girls and ethnic minorities are most at risk of hunger
ROME, Oct 12 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Global hunger has fallen more than a quarter since 2000, but conflict and climate shocks are beginning to reverse these gains, an annual global hunger index said on Thursday.
Nearly half of the 119 countries surveyed had "serious", "alarming" or "extremely alarming" hunger levels between 2012 and 2016, with war-torn Central African Republic worst affected, followed by Chad, Sierra Leone, Madagascar and Zambia.
"Conflict and climate-related shocks are at the heart of this problem," said Dominic MacSorley, chief executive of Concern, which compiled the report along with the International Food Policy Research Institute and Welthungerhilfe.
About half of the populations in the hungriest countries were short of food, it said.
South Sudan and Somalia, which are at risk of renewed famine, were among 13 countries excluded from the index due to lack of data.
The United Nations said last month that global hunger levels have risen for the first time in more than a decade, now affecting 11 percent of the world's population - or 815 million people.
Famine struck parts of South Sudan earlier this year, and there is a high risk that it could return there - and develop in other countries hit by conflict: northeast Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen, the U.N. said.
Yemen came sixth in the index as its hunger crisis has spiked since 2015 when civil war erupted and the data covers the period 2012 to 2016.
Although most of Nigeria is relatively food secure, the eight-year Islamist Boko Haram insurgency has left millions in the northeast at risk of starvation.
"We must build the resilience of communities on the ground, but we must also bolster public and political solidarity internationally," MacSorley said in a statement.
The survey found that 14 countries – including Senegal, Azerbaijan, Peru, Panama, Brazil and China – have made significant improvements since 2000.
The index is based on levels of hunger in the general population, and rates of wasting, stunting and deaths among children under five years old.
Women, girls and ethnic minorities are most at risk of hunger, which causes nearly half of deaths in under fives, it said.
"The world needs to act as one community with the shared goal of ensuring not a single child goes to bed hungry each night and no-one is left behind," MacSorley said.
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Record Amazon fires stun scientists; sign of sick, degraded forests.
Scientists warn of a dangerous synergy: forest degradation has turned the Amazon from carbon sink to carbon source; while globally, humanity’s carbon emissions are worsening drought and fires.
With the fire season still on-going, Brazil has seen 208,278 fires this year, putting 2017 on track to beat 2004’s record 270,295 fires. While drought (likely exacerbated by climate change) worsens the fires, experts say that nearly every blaze this year is human-caused.
The highest concentration of fires in the Amazon biome in September was in the São Félix do Xingu and Altamira regions. Fires in Pará state in September numbered 24,949, an astonishing six-fold increase compared with 3,944 recorded in the same month last year.
The Amazon areas seeing the most wildfires have also seen rapid change and development in recent years, with high levels of deforestation, and especially forest degradation, as loggers, cattle ranchers, agribusiness and dam builders move in.
Scientists warn of a dangerous synergy: forest degradation has turned the Amazon from carbon sink to carbon source; while globally, humanity’s carbon emissions are worsening drought and fires. Brazil’s rapid Amazon development deepens the problem. Researchers warn that mega-fires could be coming, unless trends are reversed.
Figures from the Brazilian government’s INPE (National Institute of Space Research) show that 2017 is shaping up to be the worst year on record for forest fires: 208,278 were detected by 5 October. Alberto Setzer, who runs INPE’s fire monitoring department, told Mongabay that 2017 was now on course to overtake 2004, until now the year with the most fires, when 270,295 were detected. More fires were seen in September of this year (110,736) than in any previous month in the 20 years that INPE has been recording fires.
Two rural districts in Pará state had the highest number of fires in the Amazon biome: 9,786 in São Félix do Xingu and 6,153 in Altamira up to the end of last month. The increase of fires in the whole of Pará has been astonishing: INPE figures show that there were 24,949 just in September, a six-fold increase compared with 3,944 recorded in the same month last year. In fact, 29,316 fires were recorded in all of last year for the Amazonian state.
While there is a high level of drought this year, it is clear that something other than dry conditions is driving the record number of wildfires. Setzer told Mongabay that the fires almost everywhere have a common characteristic: they are manmade.
Disturbed Amazon areas see worst burns
INPE, which has a sophisticated system for monitoring fires, has built up an impressive archive of satellite images of the damage done by the fires. This archive shows that the wildfires have increasingly been spreading into protected forests. Over fifty conserved areas have been impacted this year, almost twice the number damaged last year. And the list includes some of Brazil’s iconic nature parks.
Araguaia National Park is a highly important protected area on the island of Bananal in southwest Tocantins state. Covering 558,000 hectares (1.4 million acres), it is home to threatened species like the giant otter and jaguar, and stands out as an oasis in the midst of the parched savanna vegetation of the Cerrado that surrounds it. Earlier this month one of Brazil’s leading TV shows, the Fantástico programme on Globo TV, showed powerful images of the national park being devoured in flames. In all, 70 percent of it was destroyed.
Out-of-control fires have affected cattle ranches as well. In the region of Carmolândia in the north of Tocantins a fierce fire raced across eight farms, killing over a thousand cattle. Almost everywhere, fire brigades have been too poorly staffed and equipped to control the blazes.
2017 dry, but not a record drought
Setzer explained that when much of the vegetation is dry — the result of a prolonged drought, as happened this year — wildfires can rapidly race out of control. “In some areas of the center-west of Brazil, there hasn’t been a drop of rain for four months.”
Even so, the 2017 drought may not turn out to be exceptional. “It does not look as if the drought this year will be as severe as in 2005, 2007, 2010, and 2015/2016,” Luiz Aragão, Senior Lecturer in Earth Systems Science at Exeter University, UK, told Mongabay.
However, he added, his analysis was based on past oceanic conditions which could still change, with the 2017 drought getting worse: “This happened in 2015 when the drought intensified from October till December, but this is not usual in the Amazon.”
What seems to be occurring, he said, is that the Amazonian climate is changing — what was once regarded as an exceptional drought there, is now becoming more accepted as normal. “The dry seasons in Brazil seem to be becoming drier and more frequent,” explained Aragão, just as forecast by climate modelling, and as observed by scientists.
The Big Green Lie
The fact that there has been a record number of fires this year doesn’t necessarily mean that there has been an increase in the area deforested. Instead, fires are often the result of a different phenomenon: forest degradation, which occurs when loggers move in to extract hard timber.
Loggers only fell valuable trees they’re harvesting and those in the way. But what they leave behind under the forest canopy are heaps of dead limbs and debris — dry, flammable slash. However, that degraded understory left by loggers rarely appears in official deforestation figures, which only report on clear cuts, defined as deforested areas over 62,000 square meters (15 acres).
Antonio Donato Nobre, a visiting researcher at INPE, calls this hidden damage the Big Green Lie: “This wholesale forest degradation is not monitored and it affects massive areas, many times larger than those clear-felled in deforestation. Such degraded forests are very vulnerable to drought and fires. Indeed, it is the main reason why the fires spread so easily”.
For many decades scientists assumed major fires were unlikely in wet places like the Amazon, so scientific knowledge regarding tropical wildfire dynamics is still lacking. Ted Feldpausch, an expert in tropical ecology at Exeter University, UK, told Mongabay: “Understanding of how tropical forests change due to fire is still quite limited. This is partly due to fire being variable, burning downed trees in deforested areas and also entering standing forests, where fire movement and impact may be more cryptic, e.g. ranging from slow-moving fires that creep across the forest floor consuming litter, to high energy fires that arch through canopies and consume whole trees. This variation in fire can result in a large range of impacts on tree mortality, carbon storage in living and dead trees, and forest structure and composition.”
Lack of political will
Both Setzer and Nobre believe that, at heart, the failure to bring forest degradation and deforestation under control in Brazil is a lack of political will by federal and state governments. Setzer said: “It requires extreme political tolerance (to use a politically correct term) to allow 700,000 square kilometers [270,271 square miles] to be illegally cleared — and to know where this is happening in real time — without doing anything.”
Nobre is more outspoken: “The very agents of wanton destruction of the Amazon are now controlling the legislative and executive branches of the federal government and working day and night to increase deforestation and degradation via bills and acts that are being tolerated by the judiciary.”
Nobre believes that time is fast running out for saving the Amazon rainforest: “I was alarmed about the future of the Amazon years ago, in 2009, when there was still a good chance that we could stave off final destruction. In 2014, I published an accessible review of the scientific literature that showed that the unabated process of destruction in the Amazon was leading to disaster.
“Now I hear from colleagues studying forest degradation, on the front line and remotely, that multiple organ failure is underway in [the forests of] eastern Amazonia — that the forest is already collapsing in areas not directly affected by chain saws and bulldozers… Unless a very different government comes to power in 2019, it will be too late for huge areas of the Amazon,” he said, referring to next year’s Brazilian election.
This is how the world ends…
This year’s record wildfires are not only having Amazonian impacts. It is becoming increasingly clear to researchers that the fate of the Amazon’s forests is inextricably bound to the fate of the world — and vice versa.
While in the past Amazonian forests served humankind inadvertently by absorbing more carbon than emitted, delaying the worst impacts of global warming, Feldpausch says that has now changed. The Amazon has now become part of the problem: “The combined effect of continued droughts, fire, and forest degradation is reducing carbon stocks, resulting in Amazon forests being an estimated net source of carbon during the past decade.”
Indeed, a new, just published study by researchers at the Woods Hole Research Center and Boston University, has found that human-caused deforestation, forest degradation and disturbance of tropical forests in Africa, the Americas and Asia have resulted in those forests now emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than they sequester on an annual basis.
More alarming still, some scientists believe that the speed at which Amazonian forests are being devoured by wildfire, plus the greenhouse gas emissions from those fires, will only aggravate global warming.
In truth, the very survival of the Amazon may depend on humanity’s rapid success in radically reducing its release of greenhouse gases planet-wide. Bruno Lopes, a Ph.D student at the Federal University of Viçosa, spells this out: A recently published scientific study, to which he contributed, created a model demonstrating how the collapse of the Amazon forest might occur. If the world continues on its present track, he told Mongabay: “More severe droughts are going to make the soil drier and make the trees lose their leaves and branches. This combustible material… will accumulate in the soil and make the forest more vulnerable to high intensity fires.”
Change, he says, will not be slow, gradual or continuous. Instead, “If we follow present trends and we move toward a 4 degrees Celsius [7.2 degrees Fahrenheit] increase in global temperature by the end of the century, forest degradation will probably increase abruptly by the middle of the century.” The accumulation of combustible material may trigger mega-fires that, in the intensity suggested by their model of 600 kW/m, [a measure of the amount of fuel contained within a source] will be lethal to most trees.
The intensity of the resulting Amazon mega-fires will depend in large part on the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, he explained. “If the Paris Agreement is implemented and the increase in global temperatures is held to 2 degrees Celsius [3.6 degrees Fahrenheit], this will reduce the intensity of the fires by 68 percent.”
Unfortunately for the Amazon and humankind, current cumulative national commitments to carbon cuts under the Paris Agreement will undoubtedly result in an overshoot of the 2 degree Celsius limit — with near certain catastrophic results. This circumstance led climate scientist James Hansen to angrily label the Paris Agreement a fraud and a fake.
More than ever, the destiny of the world is interdependent on all humanity. If Brazil is to have a chance at controlling the intensity of fires in the Amazon, it needs all countries — including the U.S. — to successfully reduce carbon emissions. And if the world is to avoid disastrous global warming, it needs Brazil, sooner rather than later, to tackle and reduce forest degradation and deforestation that, if uncurbed, could create runaway mega-fires, greatly increasing carbon emissions. The clock is ticking. The fires are burning.
Map acknowledgments:
FUNAI. “Brazil indigenous lands.” Accessed through Global Forest Watch on October 9, 2017. www.globalforestwatch.org.
IUCN and UNEP-WCMC (), The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) [On-line], September, , Cambridge, UK: UNEP-WCMC. Available at: www.protectedplanet.net. Accessed through Global Forest Watch in October 2017. www.globalforestwatch.org
NASA FIRMS. “VIIRS Active Fires.” Accessed through Global Forest Watch on October 9, 2017. www.globalforestwatch.org
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Hurricane Maria: Three weeks after landfall, Puerto Rico is still dark, dry, frustrated.
While the metropolis of San Juan inches toward normalcy, much of the rest of the island still awaits basic services.
Three weeks since Hurricane Maria, much of Puerto Rico still dark, thirsty and frustrated
By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Arelis R. Hernández October 11 at 7:56 PM Follow @RoigFranzia Follow @arelisrhdz
Neighbors sit on a couch outside their destroyed homes as sun sets in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, on Sept. 26 — about a week after Hurricane Maria hit. (Gerald Herbert/AP)
YABUCOA, Puerto Rico — Late each night, Rafael Surillo Ruiz, the mayor of a town with one of Puerto Rico’s most critical ports, drives for miles on darkened roads, easing around downed power lines and crumpled tree branches — to check his email.
At the wheel of his “guagua”— local slang for an SUV — he sometimes finds a spotty cellphone signal on a highway overpass, and there he sits, often for hours, scrolling through messages. During the day, with no working landline and no Internet access, he operates more like a 19th-century mayor of Yabucoa, orchestrating the city’s business in an information vacuum, dispatching notes scrawled on slips of paper — about problems such as balky generators and misdirected water deliveries — that he hands to runners.
On the other side of the mayor’s favorite overpass spot, one of the generators at the area’s biggest hospital has collapsed from exhaustion, and the frazzled staff have stopped admitting new patients. Deeper into the island’s mountainous interior, thirsty Puerto Ricans draw drinking water from the mud-caked crevices of roadside rock formations and bathe in creeks too small to have names.
“We feel completely abandoned here,” Surillo Ruiz said with a heavy sigh.
[A light amid the darkness, a Puerto Rico church stands up as its community struggles]
It has been three weeks since Hurricane Maria savaged Puerto Rico, and life in the capital city of San Juan inches toward something that remotely resembles a new, uncomfortable form of normalcy. Families once again loll on the shaded steps of the Mercado de Santurce traditional market on a Sunday afternoon, and a smattering of restaurants and stores open their doors along sidewalks still thick with debris and tangled power lines.
But much of the rest of the island lies in the chokehold of a turgid, frustrating and perilous slog toward recovery.
Cars pass through a damaged area in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, on Sept. 29. (Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images)
When night comes, the vast majority of this 100-mile long, 35-mile wide island plunges into profound darkness, exposing the impotence of a long-troubled power grid that was tattered by Maria’s winds and rains. Eighty-four percent of the island is still without power, according to the governor’s office, and local officials in many areas are steeling themselves — with a sense of anger and dread — for six months or more without electricity.
Roughly half of Puerto Ricans have no working cellphone service, creating islands of isolation within the island and cutting off hundreds of thousands of people in regions outside the largest metropolitan areas from regular contact with their families, aid groups, medical care and the central government. Christine Enid Nieves Rodriguez, who has set up a community kitchen near the southeastern city of Humacao, has dubbed the new reality Puerto Rico’s “dystopian future.”
The jumbled contents of a store lie exposed to the elements where a roof was torn away at the Palma Real Shopping Center in Humacao, as seen Sept. 22, two days after Hurricane Maria devastated large areas of Puerto Rico. (Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/For The Washington Post)
Accompanying that vision of the future are worries about outbreaks of diseases such as scabies and Zika, which is transmitted by mosquitoes breeding in standing water. Just 63 percent of the island’s residents have access to clean drinking water, and only 60 percent of wastewater treatment plants are operating, according to figures released by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In poorer communities, such as the San Juan neighborhood of Carolina and the mountain town of Canovanas, doctors are seeing worrying numbers of patients with conjunctivitis and gastritis brought on by contaminated water and poor hygiene.
With electrical and cellphone outages complicating commerce, large swaths of the island — and even many spots within the biggest cities — are cash-only zones, as if credit cards never existed. More than 40 percent of bank branches have yet to reopen, according to the governor’s office, and barely more than 560 ATMs are functioning for an island with a population of more than 3.4 million.
Most of Puerto Rico is still in the dark after Hurricane Maria VIEW GRAPHIC
On the upside, chronic gasoline shortages that plagued the early days after the storm seem to be easing, at least in the larger cities, and 86 percent of grocery stores have reopened. But the journey to fill the gas tank or the shopping cart can be an exercise in faith and blind courage. In the sprawling metropolis of San Juan, crisscrossed by major highways and multilane streets, most streetlights are not functioning. Only a surge of post-hurricane politeness and patience seems to be preventing the morgues from swelling with traffic fatalities.
The roads in and out of San Juan are lined by denuded hillsides, their rocky, frayed surfaces exposed to the sunlight. The storm acted like a blowtorch, searing off leaves and stripping away topsoil. A surreal consequence of Maria’s transformation of the island’s landscape is the lack of shade in once-divine town squares and jungle-like hinterlands.
It is enough to make many Puerto Ricans consider fleeing the island for good, even though the thought of leaving a place they love can still seem implausible. What awaits many of them here is protracted subsistence living. In places such as the surfer haven of Playa Jobos on the northwestern coast, a woman whose wooden house was blown to bits has taken to living in a disabled food truck outfitted with a hammock.
“When I think about grandchildren, I know that I don’t want this for them,” said Lucy Rivera, an unemployed single mother who has crammed nine people, including her disabled mother and mentally ill brother, into a house that lost its roof in the town of Canovanas near El Yunque National Forest.
Rivera has no money, and her government assistance card is useless in the many businesses that have gone cash-only. So she sits in traffic for hours in a borrowed car trying to find food and get medical care.
On a recent afternoon on one of those choked Puerto Rican roads, cars jammed with children and plastic jugs pulled over to gaze at the ingenuity of Jesus Sanchez, a wiry 74-year-old retiree. Sanchez had fished a six-foot length of PVC pipe out of a ditch in Toa Alta, an ancient town 17 miles outside San Juan. He had lashed it to a forked branch with some shredded cloth and inserted the mouth of the pipe into a crook that began gushing water in the steep limestone hillside above his head.
“Now!” he called to his wife, Ana Marrero Nieves.
Marrero Nieves proceeded to toss plastic jugs — empty containers that once held cranberry juice and canola oil — over to Sanchez, who clung to the muddy slope, slipping and sliding, but smiling. More than 2½ weeks had passed since the storm, and he had not received any aid at their house, where the windows were blown out. But, from the hillside, he drew sustenance, just as he had done for days.
“If it wasn’t for this, how many would have died?” he said.
Ruth Santiago refreshes herself with water from a pipe in Morovis, Puerto Rico, on Oct. 4. Hurricane Maria destroyed the town's bridge. (Alvin Baez/Reuters)
The roads narrow as they snake up the mountains, then dip down into the jaw-dropping valleys of central Puerto Rico, passing by town after town where the wind tore roofs off nearly every humble cinder-block dwelling and splintered the yet-humbler wooden shacks. Flamboyant trees that once prettied the countryside with branches lit by brilliant red flowers lie by the thousands alongside thick-trunked rubber trees. Stands of bamboo with stalks thicker than the fat end of a baseball bat form archways that scrape the roofs of all but the squattest of cars.
Being miles away from the coast provided no safety to the residents of Morovis, a town of about 30,000 that sprawls over bluffs and into ravines in north-central Puerto Rico. Zerimar Rivera, a 31-year-old mother of twin boys, couldn’t stand the smell of sweat anymore and headed for a trickling creek south of town.
“We’re going to the washboard, like in the time of our grandparents,” she called out to a friend, as she plunged a shirt into a five-
gallon paint primer bucket filled with creek water and detergent. Rivera is a teacher, and like many middle- and lower-middle-class Puerto Ricans, she is paid only when she works, and she has not worked a moment since the storm hit on Sept. 20.
Rafael Reyes, his wife, Xarelis Negron, and their son, Xariel, stand next to salvaged belongings wrapped in plastic on the foundation of their shattered home in the San Lorenzo neighborhood of Morovis, Puerto Rico, on Oct. 7. (Ramon Espinosa/AP)
Rivera’s dilemma is the same as that facing Eric Bonet and Sherrie Berrios, a couple who work as dog groomers in the town of Barceloneta. One day after the storm, Berrios says, they were hungry and thirsty when Bonet turned to her and said, “I think I’m going to turn the car into a pickup truck.”
Bonet quickly stripped the seats out of the back of their 1994 Nissan Altima. He enlisted a buddy to join them and stuffed some couch cushions in the back so Berrios would have a place to sit, and they were off in search of aluminum.
In Morovis, they scored big-time, rifling through a pile of garbage across from an outdoor bar until they found an old-
fashioned restaurant sign with an aluminum frame. Bonet ripped it off with an eight-inch Ginsu kitchen knife and added the loot to the rest of the treasures they had strapped to the car’s roof. Days of work earned them $140 at 30 cents a pound.
[There was once a bridge here: A devastated Puerto Rico community deals with isolation after Maria]
There is almost no place on the island where the enterprising scavenger couple couldn’t stand a decent chance of adding to their pile. The storm was so brutal and so wide that it covered the length and breadth of the island, damaging at least 60,000 homes, according to government estimates that some here consider far below the real figure. But only one place can claim to be the spot where Maria made landfall, and that is down along the southeastern coast near Yabucoa, where Surillo Ruiz is mayor.
Yabucoa sits in a wide, fertile valley, which is perfect for growing plantains but is also an ideal funnel for hurricane winds. On an incline overlooking the valley, Carmen Manso presides at a senior center that doubles as a local museum inside a grand, century-old house with wide wooden beams and tile floors that resemble a checkerboard. Her handful of clients, including several who served in the U.S. military, stick to the lower floor because the storm tore off much of the building’s roof, exposing upstairs rooms filled with paintings, artifacts and beds.
“When it rains, this is like Niagara Falls,” Manso said with a chuckle. She does not have much choice but to laugh. One morning she set off with several of her clients’ ATM cards so she could withdraw money for them.
She drove 25 minutes to the town of Humacao, but the bank was closed.
She drove another half-hour to the town of Gurabo, but they had run out of money.
She pressed on another 20 minutes down the road and arrived at a bank in Caguas. The line at the ATM trailed down the street; 2½ hours later, she finally was able to pull out some cash for her clients. And she still had to drive home.
Motorists wait in line to buy gasoline in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, in Morovis, Puerto Rico. (Gerald Herbert/AP)
She returned to a place where the mayor had been run out of city hall by storm winds that punched a massive, jagged hole in the roof, turning the building into an outsize, end-to-end pass-through window. The mayor is now based in a small conference room in his town’s medical clinic. He got a satellite phone as government recovery aid, but he can’t make it work — a complaint other mayors with similar technology have echoed.
On his nightly trip in search of a cellphone signal, Surillo Ruiz keeps hearing from people on the U.S. mainland who want to help his town. One night it was Ricky Martin, the heartthrob Puerto Rican singer whose charitable foundation has been active in the relief effort. But Surillo Ruiz really does not know how to respond to most requests. He has little faith, he says, that aid intended for Yabucoa will make it to Yabucoa. He worries that it will either be misappropriated because of corruption or mishandled through incompetence or confusion.
He worries even more about the potential for a health crisis. The nearest full-scale medical center — Ryder Memorial Hospital, a 103-year-old nonprofit institution — is 13 hard-driving miles away. The hospital, too, is cut off from the world.
“When people say send me an email, I say, ‘What! By smoke signals?’ ” said Deana Hallman, Ryder’s medical director.
[Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis nowhere more obvious than at hospitals]
Hallman and other hospital executives were unstinting in their criticism of Puerto Rico’s health secretary, Rafael Rodriguez-Mercado, accusing him of wasting time “assigning blame” to others and sowing “divisiveness.” Health Department officials have not responded to requests for comment.
One of Ryder’s generators failed a few days ago, and several critically ill patients had to be flown to a U.S. Navy hospital ship. By last weekend, the other generators, which according to the hospital’s protocols are not supposed to run for more than seven days, had been operating for 17.
By chance, Hallman was passing through an area with cell coverage a few days ago, and she lurched her car to a stop. An administrator at another hospital told her about a meeting with government health officials in San Juan, a gathering that was supposed to be an opportunity for the government to tell hospitals what it could do to help them.
Each hospital got a sheet listing the aid it would receive following government assessments of their needs.
Some of the lists were long. Ryder’s was short.
It had just one item: diesel.
There was only one problem: Ryder had not asked for diesel, Hallman said. It had plenty.
Instead, the hospital had been asking — over and over, through 10 site visits by Puerto Rican and federal officials — for repairs to the electrical grid that would end their reliance on generators.
“The government just needs to put the grid back,” Lirio Torres Sepulveda, a Ryder executive said. “That’s their job.”
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