“OMG, we’re all gonna die,” the phrase of my generation
As a California native, I spent my summers within the sweltering warmth. I splashed via the horrible twos within the kiddie pool inflated in my yard, sashayed into the neighbor’s sprinklers after watching “Excessive Faculty Musical” in fifth grade, and spent numerous hours getting misplaced within the labyrinth of “Water World” as a teen.
I believed this yr could be the identical — blistering however blissful. However after I wakened in February to snow peppering the height of Mount Diablo, I sensed that this summer time wouldn’t be full of the same old sunbathing adventures.
For some time, the snow was enjoyable. I watched classmates drive as much as the snow after college and expertise the winter wonderland for themselves. It was the primary time any of us had seen snow since we had been younger. It felt like a miracle.
Little did we all know we had been within the eye of the hurricane — the calm earlier than the storm.
For 3 weeks, Danville was engulfed. A deluge of tropical moisture blanketed my hometown in Contra Costa County and the remainder of the state with unrelenting rain and snow. We had been bombarded with climate alerts warning of floods and harmful winds. Lights started to flicker and shortly the ability went out, leaving us in complete darkness, even throughout college.
Quickly, my city, nonetheless submerged below floodwater, started to slip. Landslides pitched boulders and soil down canyons, tumbling into oncoming visitors. Piles of particles buried highways and native roads. Flat roads grew to become rollercoasters of warped concrete. The cruel winds knocked bushes over like matchsticks.
It felt like a fever dream — how had sunny California become a soaking mess? The reply was a phrase that has turn into synonymous amongst my mates: “OMG, we’re all gonna die.”
As Californians, we’ve all the time identified that local weather change exists all over the world and that it usually makes unhealthy climate occasions extra excessive. For a very long time, we assumed local weather change was some far-off downside that wouldn’t have an effect on us. Icebergs in Antarctica. Third-world nations. Poorer individuals. We assumed we had been separated from the looming destruction and that in some way we had been protected from the worst of it.
We didn’t anticipate it to return so quickly.
Within the aftermath, I used to be continuously reminded of the devastation. In school, an oak tree department tore down the roof of the sports activities drugs classroom. The seaside my household drives to each spring break was flooded past restore, leaving 1000’s of residents homeless. Stanley Greenback Drive, the road I cross each week on my option to work on the animal hospital, was lined with flowers commemorating a person who died after a tree toppled over, crushing him inside his automotive.
March’s onslaught of harmful storms killed 5 individuals within the Bay Space alone.
Just some months earlier than the storm, researchers on the Nationwide Middle for Atmospheric Analysis reported that local weather change had doubled the danger of an excessive storm able to producing a megaflood in California. Whereas some consultants dispute whether or not the winter storms this yr had been attributable to local weather change, there was little speak of the catastrophe predictions we got by scientists, or of proposed laws to stop catastrophes like this sooner or later.
This leaves many to marvel, what will it require for California to lastly take actual, significant motion?
To make certain, California has taken motion to fight the results of maximum climate, like landslides. Particles basins — pits carved out of the panorama to catch materials flowing downhill — have been commissioned throughout the state. However basins, which might require numerous land, may also disrupt the pure ecosystem. Some won’t be massive sufficient to guard towards future landslides worsened by a hotter local weather.
Apart from, protecting measures hardly scratch the floor of the basis downside: local weather change. If we need to create actual, unfiltered change, we have to begin inside our personal communities — electrifying houses, utilizing clear transportation and decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels. Federal packages such because the House Vitality Rebate Program assist cowl the price of switching from gas-powered kitchen home equipment to electrical variations, selling a extra sustainable future for California.
As summer time approaches, I can’t assist however marvel if snowy winters and drenched springs are the long run that’s been carved out for us. For now, I can solely hope — hope that we will work collectively to guard California by meaningfully addressing local weather change.
Olivia Brandeis is a pupil at Monte Vista Excessive Faculty in Danville. She wrote this commentary for CalMatters’ Earth Day contest for center and highschool college students.
