By Nina Thompson for Next City.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Each time a fire breaks out in Northern California, local activist Quinn Redwoods and their collaborators spring into action. Walking through Oakland, Redwoods distributes masks to as many people as they can. They hand out masks in places where no one else is paying attention, like crowded underpasses where unhoused people have no options to escape the smoke. They’ll even stop UPS drivers to offer them a mask. Redwoods describes the activity as “organically emerging.”

It all started back in 2017 during the Tubbs Fire, when it was so smoky in the San Francisco Bay Area it wasn’t safe to be outside. As people started posting on social media desperate to find masks, Redwoods quickly realized that the most vulnerable people in the community would be the least likely to have access to that kind of protective equipment — and also the most exposed. They scanned the web and found one hardware store in Oakland with masks, and went there to buy as many as they could. Then, they turned to Twitter and Venmo, created “Mask Oakland” accounts, and started raising money to buy more. Within hours, Redwoods was passing out masks.

What started as a pop-up organization has just kept going, as Californians and the rest of the country start to understand the risk of unhealthy air from wildfire smoke, which has grown exponentially in recent years. Since 2017, Redwoods has distributed tens of thousands of masks through Mask Oakland, and their approach includes paying special attention to overlooked or marginalized communities. That was part of the intention from the beginning, according to Redwoods, who identifies as “queer, trans, disabled, plural.” As they put it: “Woven in with the history of Mask Oakland and our climate activism has been advocating for people like us.”

Redwoods grew up in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. They remember the community as divided into thirds: people working for the government, people trying to influence the government, and everyone else. Their parents took them to protests as a kid, and they chose to keep going when they were a teen. “From a young age, I also wanted to do something that would help people.”

Redwoods explored different approaches to activism. “And then … I learned that I’m trans and plural, and didn’t really know what to do with that at first,” they say. “So I just kind of went and worked for some environmental groups because I was like, ‘At least I need a planet.’”

Redwoods moved to California in 2014, looking for a place where they could connect with a larger trans community. Three years later, Redwoods was driving home from a permaculture conference near Santa Rosa in Northern California when the Tubbs Fire broke out. “And then it was really windy, like scary windy,” they recall. “And then there was smoke. And then we were driving down the 101 [highway] at night, and it was right before the 101 got shut down. … I drove past [the fire] and I was like, ‘Should we stop and like, look at this?’ And my friend was like, ‘No, keep driving!’”

During the fire, Redwoods remembers hearing that masks were sold-out in many places. They were able to pick up an N95, but many people didn’t have access to masks, which can help protect from wildfire smoke. Seeing so many people exposed to the toxic air freaked them out. “There were people under bridges, no one had any masks and everyone was outside.”

Redwoods decided to take action. “I bought $300 of N95s. And I took a picture of the receipt, created a Twitter account, and created a Venmo.”

From there, Mask Oakland was born.

Redwoods says they drove under some of the highway underpasses where people were camped out, “and I just started giving people some masks and talking to people.” There were no other programs doing anything similar to protect unhoused residents from smoke. “It was just very jarring, like no one’s doing anything. We’re the only ones doing this.”

They were underemployed at the time, and Redwoods recalls spending their days at the Impact Hub in Oakland, a coworking space, “just trying to figure out what I was doing in my life.” Without full-time employment, they lacked financial stability, but had the time and availability to get Mask Oakland off the ground. They were also able to connect with like-minded folks at the coworking space who were keen to help out. So they kept raising money and buying up new batches of masks from the same hardware store. “I think we got about 4,000 masks that year,” Redwoods says. “And I never recovered that 300 bucks.”

The fire ended, and Redwoods went on with their life once the need went away. But just the next year, in 2018, the need arose again. Redwoods started getting messages on Facebook, “and they were like, ‘Hey, the Camp Fire, have you heard of it? Are you guys going to do anything?’ And I was like, ‘Oh God, I guess we better do something.’”

Redwoods teamed up with others and started giving out masks again. One of the volunteers, Cassandra Williams, who had helped in 2017 as well, tweeted about what they were doing. By the end of that night, Redwoods says they received enough money to make up for the costs from that day. And then — “I woke up to about $15,000 in my Venmo from that Twitter thread. And we just built and built and built to about $100,000 raised and 85,000 masks distributed.”

Donations are only one part of the equation in running Mask Oakland. Redwoods found that they were always trying to balance three things: masks, money, and people. There would be an excess of one thing, and not enough of the other. They went through the cycle again in August through October of 2020, another active fire season

“It impacted my health, probably the health of a lot of people who were involved because it’s very stressful and feeling like if I don’t [do something], I can’t rest. If I don’t push myself a little further, then that might be thousands of people who don’t get anything, any help.” Despite the clear need for masks, Redwoods says there still weren’t any other organizations addressing the issue like Mask Oakland was.

The number of Americans experiencing at least one day of unhealthy air from wildfire smoke has increased 27 fold in the last decade, including almost 25 million people in 2020 alone. Since COVID hit, there’s been another complication: the politicization of masks. But the fire risk hasn’t gone anywhere, so Redwoods says people at their organization find themselves having to explain “it’s just for the smoke.”

Redwoods says COVID has “massively complexified everything,” including respiratory health. “It’s like a scientifically proven terrible combo. You know,fire, smoke and COVID.”

Another ongoing challenge: Redwoods says donations can be unreliable if you aren’t constantly “getting attention for the thing you’re doing.” When fires are happening, and there is a lot of media coverage, Mask Oakland receives more donations. But when the fires stop, it seems that people stop caring. Immediately after the Tubbs Fire in 2017 and the Camp Fire 2018, Redwoods says “the support and momentum just collapsed.”

They’ve learned to accept it as part of being a mutual aid organizer — staying nimble and finding other sources of income when it’s slow, so they aren’t dependent on fires to pay the rent.

“It’s a lot of riding waves,” Redwoods says. “And then also it creates this desire for another wave, but you know another wave won’t come unless there’s another fire.”


Nina Thompson wrote this article for Next City.


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By Annie Ropeik for Energy News Network.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Maine News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Overnight in early July last year, Vermont solar installer Bill Chidsey got a call that a grocery store he worked with in his village of Hardwick was flooded. He arrived to find feet of water in the Buffalo Mountain Market's utility room, spilling over from the rising Lamoille River in a record-breaking rainstorm.

"The grocery store survived by an inch," Chidsey said. "If it had rained fifteen more minutes, they'd have lost four compressors."

He's now helping the co-op build a net-zero energy system that will use solar power and recycled waste heat from the store's refrigerators. But it's going to be a long project - just one of countless examples Vermont has seen since last year of how sustainable rebuilds in the wake of a flood don't happen quickly.

"I think we're just getting started with this," Chidsey said.

Advocates, utilities and state agencies have seen slow progress and mixed success since July 2023 in trying to replace flood-damaged home and business energy systems with more efficient, cost-effective, low-carbon technology. Now, they hope to redouble these efforts as part of a long-term recovery - both to keep people affected last year from falling through the cracks, and to be more resilient in the next storm.

"We consider that we're now about to start 'phase two,' where we hope to go back and talk about energy systems," said Sue Minter, who leads Capstone Community Action in central Vermont. "In the emergency - with winter and nowhere else to go, and oh, by the way, no contractors available, labor shortage, material shortage, crisis - we couldn't do the transition work, but that doesn't mean we won't."

Lessons from storm Irene

More than a decade ago, Minter was the deputy secretary of Vermont's Agency of Transportation when the 2011 Tropical Storm Irene - comparable in its severity to the 2023 floods - washed out hundreds of miles of roads and bridges across the state.

As the state's Irene Recovery Officer, Minter spent the next two-plus years grappling with federal regulators and pushing through new policies and programs to rebuild "stronger, with resilience in mind," she said. This included allowing easier upsizing of culverts and clearing development out of floodplains.

Many places with these post-Irene resilience upgrades and reforms saw less damage in the July 2023 floods as a result, Minter said. Vermont officials even came to a recent meeting of the Maine Climate Council, after a pair of weather disasters there, to talk about their approach to flood-resilient infrastructure.

"When you know you're in an emergency, and you know everything has been destroyed, you also know it's an opportunity to innovate ... to rebuild differently," Minter said.

Vermont, often called a potential haven for future climate migrants, is nonetheless seeing more frequent and intense rain and floods as one of its top impacts from human-caused climate change. The state also relies heavily on pricey, carbon-intensive heating oil.

After last year's floods, Vermont leaders wanted to seize the moment to help affected residents make future-looking energy and efficiency upgrades on a widespread scale.

"They're ripping out drywall, they're having to update systems - this is the time to make sure that you do it properly," said Efficiency Vermont supply chain engagement manager Steve Casey.

Making emergency rebates accessible

Efficiency Vermont, a statewide energy efficiency utility, created an emergency flood rebate program for affected homeowners and renters, reallocating $10 million in pandemic aid already set aside for low-income weatherization projects.

The new program offered up to $10,000 per household to repair or replace flood-damaged energy systems and other appliances, on top of existing funding for efficient electric heat pump water heaters and electrical panel upgrades. Similar rebates for damaged businesses were just raised to a $16,000 cap.

But uptake on this funding has been slow. As of January, only 155 households had received flood rebates of $5,100 apiece on average, according to state legislative testimony from Efficiency Vermont director Peter Walke.

It's partly because the initial $10 million was "an overshoot to ensure we wouldn't run out of funds," allocated quickly "without knowing what the actual need would be," said spokesperson Matthew Smith.

But people also ran into myriad barriers to using the money quickly.

Some lacked up-front cash to pay for upgrades that would be rebated later. In response, Efficiency Vermont has begun offering a 100% cost-coverage program for the lowest-income clients, where contractors are paid directly by the state. That program had paid out nearly $92,000 to 10 people as of January, per Walke's testimony, with 58 more in the pipeline.

"The households that are still in significant need at this stage were vulnerable households to begin with," Casey said. "We do have this repeating situation where flood events kind of just exacerbate some vulnerabilities for certain households."

'Life and safety first'

The timing of the 2023 floods was another complicating factor. The upcoming heating season loomed in the months after the disaster, and limited housing stock meant people couldn't relocate from damaged homes, unlike after Tropical Storm Irene, said Sue Minter.

"In 2023, July, people had to get into their homes as quickly as possible," she said. "You always have to have life and safety first."

The repairs and retrofits needed most urgently were not simple. Many people's water and space heating systems and electrical panels were in basements, "the first place to flood," said Casey.

Parts of Vermont are trying to change this norm - Waterbury, for example, requires basements to be above flood elevation in new or substantially improved home construction, among other flood protections.

Chidsey, the solar installer in Hardwick, said he and his electrician have tried to shift to putting electrical panels on the outside of homes, with any indoor subpanels out of the basement. Ideally, he said, the cellar becomes "just a hole in the ground that holds up the house, because water comes in often now."

But moving HVAC infrastructure out of a vulnerable basement, whether to meet a local requirement or voluntarily, isn't easy, especially after major damage, Casey said. People may not have a ready space for that equipment on the first floor, or may need mold remediation before taking on serious flood-proofing.

It means that the advocates working to facilitate upgrades have had to take a long view.

'The promise that we'll be back'

Last fall, Efficiency Vermont, Capstone, the state's utilities and a range of other partners stood up a new system of Vermont Energy Recovery Teams, who went into damaged homes to help people plan and prioritize repairs before winter, including coordinating holistically across contractors and funding sources.

Some homes were able to switch straight to heat pumps as a cheaper, cleaner method of water and space heating, officials said. But for many, a replacement oil or gas system was the simplest short-term option.

Efficiency Vermont does not normally offer incentives for installing fossil fuel systems, but made exceptions for high-efficiency Energy Star-rated models as part of its flood recovery rebate program.

"In every case, we looked for something that was more efficient than what they had before," said Vermont Gas energy innovation director Richard Donnelly, who was part of many recovery team home visits.

In each of those visits, the teams would take note of residents' long-term needs and goals for decarbonization, resilience, comfort and lower energy burdens, with an emphasis on heat pumps.

"We left off with sort of the promise that we'll be back," said Vermont Gas CEO Neale Lunderville - that "there's money available for some of these technologies, that we can help you with the same process."

The recovery teams are now under the umbrella of GreenSavingSmart, a pilot energy and financial coaching program for low-income residents run by the Vermont Community Action Partnership. They'll soon begin revisiting last fall's clients to facilitate a new round of resilient improvements.

"In the grand scheme of things, it's a hopeful pathway to allow these households to have - once they're fully made whole and recovered from all of this - a lower energy burden and cost burden than the situation they were in to begin with," said Steve Spatz, an account manager on the supply chain team at Efficiency Vermont. "It really is an opportunity to ... upgrade the conditions for the household."


Annie Ropeik wrote this article for Energy News Network.

State officials in Maine are preparing the next generation for climate change-related activism and careers.

A new state-run website helps young Mainers find ways to use their own talents and interests to counter any climate anxiety and work to build the state's climate resilience.

Abigail Hayne is Maine's youth climate engagement coordinator.

"Whether it's taking action just in your community or in your life, or exploring different climate jobs that are specific to Maine," said Hayne, "the youths can just kind of poke around and find something that makes sense to them."

Hayne said the website offers practical, localized ways young people can get active with their town or school as well as Maine's Climate Council, which currently includes a dozen youth representatives.

Maine faces simultaneous challenges. The state is warming faster than the global average and coping with an increase in extreme weather events.

It also has one of the oldest populations in the nation.

Hayne said towns statewide are developing plans to strengthen infrastructure, and the state has a responsibility to make sure young people are well-informed about these climate-related jobs.

"Soon enough, we're going to start seeing younger generations really on the front lines of climate change and community resilience," said Hayne, "and we need to make sure that they are fully prepared when they enter those roles."

More than 170 communities are utilizing state grants to identify the roads, buildings and energy infrastructure that is susceptible to climate change and begin needed upgrades.

Construction, engineering and electrical workers will be in high demand.

Hayne said the website can connect young Mainers with these new work opportunities as well as each other.






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School buses are getting cleaner in Washington state after this year's legislative session.

Lawmakers in Olympia passed House Bill 1368, which will fund the purchase of zero emission school buses.

Rep. Tana Senn, D-Mercer Island, said the program is getting off the ground quickly.

"As we work towards that long-term goal of all new school buses being zero emission, we're kick-starting this year with $40 million in grants to school districts in overburdened communities," Senn explained.

Going forward, Senn noted school districts will have to purchase zero-emission vehicles once the total cost of ownership is equal to or lower than the cost of diesel vehicles. The state is leveraging the state's Climate Commitment Act resources to fund the transition of its 10,000 school buses.

Devin Denney, director of transportation for Highline Public Schools in King County, which already has electric school buses in its fleet, said he has driven the electric buses and talked about some of their benefits from a driver's perspective.

"You're not competing against that engine noise, the kids aren't competing against the engine noise," Denney observed. "It's a much quieter bus all the way around. The major advantage, of course, is that there's no tailpipe emissions with an electric bus, so our kids' health is better protected."

Senn emphasized health studies have shown there are negative health effects from diesel vehicles for kids, and it is easy to understand why.

"If you think about kids waiting to get on their bus in front of an elementary school and you have this line of buses idling, letting out diesel fumes right at the height of a little child, it becomes obvious that this is probably not the most healthy thing for our children," Senn added.


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