California wildfires taint the skies

Recent fires painted the skies with various hues of red and orange

Daisy Calderon, Graduated Photo Editor|September 25, 2020

Smoke can be smelled in the air and ashes lightly cover the cars parked outside of an apartment in Oak Park on Sept. 10, 2020. (Daisy Calderon/Talon)

Your vision grows hazy as clouds of smoke surround your home. The sky, though normally a soft blue is tainted with hues of red and orange, both combining in an intricate dance around each other. If one didn’t know better, then this could easily be misinterpreted as a scene on the planet of Tatooine from Star Wars. Unfortunately, this isn’t a make-believe planet in a fictional universe, nor is it a movie set.

California has once again entered “fire season” and citizens can already feel its presence. On Sept. 10, the skies of Oak Park and surrounding cities were tainted with hues of red and orange, due to the recent California wildfires. According to an article by Paul Dugunski for the Los Angeles Times, the “smoke particles from California’s numerous fires are producing red skies.”

In another recent article by CBS news, social media users have apparently taken to comparing the sky “to the planet Mars, the film “Blade Runner 2049” and the shows “Stranger Things” and “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”

Though these fires are commonly seen in California, other states have been affected by them as well. As of Sept. 25 parts of Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming are at risk, particularly cities in Wyoming are considered to be in “critical conditions.”

“We haven’t even got into the October and November fire season, and we’ve broken the all-time record,” the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Captain Richard Cordova said in a statement.

However, citizens can find solace knowing that the Center for Disaster Philanthropy has reported that all of the fires have reached some level of containment.