Look at the West Coast’s apocalyptic hell sky

By Morgan Clendaniel

Fires have been burning in California for weeks, and a new heat wave and strong winds over Labor Day weekend sparked several more across the state and in Oregon. With those fires has come intense, thick smoke affecting the region’s air quality (San Francisco has had 23 straight days of warnings about bad air), but the amount of smoke in the sky on September 9 reached a new level, blocking the sun and creating a disturbing orange-hued world.

Though sunrise was at 6 a.m., Twitter users documenting the strange light noticed it was dark well past that time.

A government observatory camera simply showed what appeared to be an orange square:

In Oregon, close to some of the larger fires, the sky had an extra, pinkish tinge:

And across San Francisco, Twitter users documented an orange-gray haze in the sky:

Meteorologist Drew Tuma put out a call for photos to try to document the sky’s color (a task made more difficult by iPhone’s built-in color correction) and got some great shots:

This year now holds the record for the most acres burned in California: more than 2.2 million. The second and third largest fires in the historical record are currently burning. Fires are also burning across Washington and Oregon (as well as Colorado) and the smoke from all these fires is filtering across the entire United States.

The immediate cause is a recent heat wave—temperatures reached 120 degrees in parts of California) and strong winds—but the deeper problem is a combination of three factors. First, climate change, which is increasing temperatures, resulting in drier fuel, which makes fires easier to start and more likely to expand. Second, the failure of the government to manage wooded areas through controlled burns of their own, which would mitigate the effect of naturally occurring fires. And third, the continued migration of people forced out of cities by high costs, who are moving further and further into wooded areas that are more likely to burn. Until all three are fixed, West Coasters might expect these remarkable skies to simply become their new late summer normal.

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