Angel Island might be one of the hardest places in California to hold a prescribed burn. Fire engines have to arrive on a boat, one at a time, all seven of them. The weather can’t be too wet or too dry, so it almost always has to happen in the summer when firefighters are often needed elsewhere. Once on site, firefighters have to travel single file along the narrow trails. When all the logistics come together, the burn still needs approval from the Bay Area Air District. The goal is to pick a day that will avoid wafting smoke to the 7 million residents in the Bay Area—and there’s no such thing as a zero-wind day on Angel Island. “This is probably one of the most modeled fires I’ve ever worked on,” says Sarah Gibson, the statewide burn boss at California State Parks. “We had climatologists working with us for over a month.”
Yet somehow, on Sept. 8 and 23, California State Parks and its partners got seven fire trucks and dozens of fire personnel onto the island and managed to safely burn 147 acres. Despite all the weather modeling, the wind still came and did what it likes to do best: change directions, sending smoke toward East Bay lungs. Complaints started rolling in, leaving broadcast burns on Angel Island postponed indefinitely, at least until the end of the year.
California is in the midst of a climate-change-fueled wildfire crisis, and the state has been trying to reduce the risk of catastrophic fires, including by dramatically upping the acreage of prescribed burns each year. The state is averaging about 591,000 acres a year, according to a 2026 PPIC report, well short of a million-acre annual goal. Studies have found smoke exposure to people from prescribed burns is significant, but the hope is that such burns will ultimately lessen the health burden from smoke by preventing catastrophic wildfires…