How has life in the Bay Area changed over the last 20 years? These stories straight from our Bay City News archives capture news of the day from 5, 10, and 20 years ago – as originally published at the time. Explore these history snapshots and ponder how today’s news compares to that of years past.
JULY 31, 2021
Climate adaptation must account for the psychological effects of smoke that can linger far beyond a fire zone. Researchers found major gaps in evidence about prolonged exposure while identifying anxiety, isolation and disrupted daily life as urgent concerns.
Bay City News Reported:
“Researchers Flag Mental Health Risks From Wildfire Smoke”
Wildfire season in California is damaging, dreaded and, unfortunately, inevitable. And the most Californians can really do is brace themselves for the unexpected with tactics encouraged by fire officials and emergency response teams.
But, as wildfires begin to increase in duration and severity, the weeks and months of hazy skies may take a greater mental toll on Californians than their emergency kits or home hardening tactics can prepare them for.
David Eisenman, a professor at University of California Los Angeles’ community health sciences department, studies community resilience and behavioral responses to disaster and trauma. He recently presented his latest findings at a UC Symposium on wildfires last Wednesday, and his field of study was an outlier in a sea of statistics on climate change and landscaping tactics.
“Now there’s a lot of research on the acute traumatic mental health effects on people who have had their lives threatened or their homes destroyed by fire,” Eisenman said at the event. “But what about people whose homes and lives are not actually threatened by the flames? What do we know about the mental health effects of many weeks or even months of wildfire smoke exposure?”
Not enough, he concluded.
Eisenman, along with a team of researchers, looked into 30 year’s worth of preexisting research on smoke and mental health, but both qualitative and quantitative studies did not fully address the long-term effects.
One quantitative study from Indonesia in 2014 looked at the short-term effects of forest fires, and found an acute association to psychological stress and changes in cerebral blood flow.
“They found out that the blood vessels to the brain were changed in how they dilated and constricted in response to the haze, and that those blood vessel changes were correlated with symptoms of anxiety, nervousness, nausea, headaches, and a bunch of other symptoms,” Eisenman said.
Another study from Canada found that smoke directly impacted communities who had to stay indoors, with subjects frequently citing feelings of fear, isolation and anxiety.
There’s three specific challenges to researching wildfire smoke like this, Eisenman said. For starters, the state-wide data on mental health historically derives from hospitals and care facilities, and diagnoses or hospitalization records would not be relevant to the study. It’s also difficult to assemble enough of a data set with only short-term events, as compared to years’ worth of effects for topics like industrial air pollution. And lastly, defining who is exposed and who is not is difficult when smoke covers vast areas (for example, remember that orange day in San Francisco last year?).
“The toxins in wildfire can be just as bad if not worse than industrial air pollution,” Eisenman said. “So there’s good reason to believe that these effects are going to be seen if we have these more of these prolonged wildfires, prolonged smoke.”
Though there’s room for more research, these studies did shed a light on mechanisms during wildfire season that could affect people’s outlook; for example, reduced physical activity, isolation from community, food insecurity and negative reminders. Eisenman also mentioned “solastalgia,” which is grieving the loss of land and climate change crisises.
“Studies should focus on the chronic, persistent or repeated smoke events and should distinguish between the exacerbation of existing mental health states versus the impact on incidence of new symptoms,” the study concludes. “Quality of life should also be studied as an outcome.”
JULY 31, 2016
Naturalization ceremonies make immigration policy visible as a civic milestone for families and communities. Children from ten countries were set to receive citizenship certificates in Oakland after becoming citizens through their parents.
Bay City News reported:
“Oakland Ceremony Welcomes Young New Citizens”
Twenty children from 10 different countries will take the Oath of Allegiance Monday at a special ceremony in Oakland, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials.
USCIS Field Office Director Robin Barrett will administer the oath to the children, aged three to nine, who became United States citizens upon their parents’ naturalization, USCIS officials said.
The ceremony is set to take place at noon at Children’s Fairyland, located at 699 Bellevue Ave., with Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf delivering opening remarks.
Inspirational speaker and youth counselor Michael Pritchard will also speak at the event. Pritchard has been nationally recognized for his work on anti-bullying programs and was the subject of the documentary Happy, according to USCIS officials.
JULY 31, 2006
Campus expansion can shift major transportation, fire protection and utility costs onto surrounding communities. California’s high court required a new environmental report addressing off-campus infrastructure impacts from CSU Monterey Bay’s long-range growth plan.
Bay City News reported:
“High Court Orders New CSU Monterey Bay Environmental Review”
The California Supreme Court ruled today that the trustees of California State University must prepare a new environmental impact report on a planned expansion of a campus in Monterey County.
The campus, known as CSU Monterey Bay, occupies 1,370 acres of the 27,000 acres of the former Fort Ord Army base.
The campus was established in 1994 after the Army left the base and opened the following year with 663 students. Plans are now under way to expand the college into a major institution enrolling 25,000 students.
The high court said the trustees must redo their environmental report to include a plan for alleviating impacts on infrastructure such as roads and fire protection outside the campus but within the base.
The court’s unanimous ruling was issued in San Francisco in a lawsuit filed by the Fort Ord Reuse Authority, a state agency set up by the Legislature to plan for financing and construction of infrastructure improvements on the former base.
The court said the mitigation plans in the revised report could be either actions taken within the campus, such as reducing automobile use, or a plan to reimburse the reuse authority for a share of infrastructure improvements.
The trustees had agreed to pay for part of drainage, water supply and wastewater management and none of roadway and fire protection improvements needed outside the campus boundaries.
They argued unsuccessfully that agreeing to payments to the reuse agency would be an unconstitutional gift of public funds because state property is exempt from taxation.
But Justice Kathryn Werdegar wrote in the court’s ruling that voluntary payments would be only one option for mitigation and could not be considered a tax.
Werdegar wrote, “The plain language of the California Constitution does not support the trustees’ position that voluntary mitigation payments are impermissible.”
California State University is the largest university system in the nation, with 23 campuses and 405,000 students statewide.
Editor’s Note: All the reporting, writing, and editing of this content was done by human journalists at the time of initial publication. AI tools were used to surface these stories from our internal Bay City News archives and provide the introductory context.