Two Disasters Are Exponentially Worse Than One

Eleven thousand lightning strikes, 370 wildfires, a pandemic, a heat wave, and rolling blackouts—California has endured a lot this week. Hundreds of thousands of acres have burned, and tens of thousands of people have had to evacuate. The largest of the blazes—the LNU Lightning Complex fires, which alone span Napa, Sonoma, Solano, and Lake Counties—is only 7 percent contained.

One disaster is bad. Two are worse, but the damage doesn’t just double. This confluence of circumstances can seem like a series rolling in from the Southwest initiated the heat wave and the thunderstorms, which together created the conditions for the fires, which will likely both exacerbate and be exacerbated by the pandemic, which and, along with the heat wave, contributed to the blackouts by keeping people at home with their air-conditioning on full blast.