With a few bags of luggage and keepsakes ready to be hauled out the front door at a moment’s notice, the Frank and Terrie Bach household is as prepared as they can be.
This weekend, the closest wildfire to their Leimert Park neighbourhood residence in Los Angeles was approximately 20 kilometres, with various others raging throughout the city and its surrounding area.
As of mid-day Sunday, the State of California counted 105 wildfires, 40,300 acres burned, more than 12,300 structures destroyed and approximately 10 fatalities, though some news outlets’ estimates are higher.
The Bach couple is formerly of Greater Sudbury, and they’re in Los Angeles with their four-year-old daughter, Cove.
This weekend, Sudbury.com connected with Frank (formerly Frank Chartrand), whose career in the tech industry helped inspire the couple’s shift to the west coast approximately nine years ago.
Bach is known locally for co-founding Sudbury-based Bureau, a since-closed digital advertising agency. He helped design the meditation and sleep app Headspace, and designed the official flag for Azilda, the community he grew up in.
(In 2016, he wrote an article for medium.com called “Sudbury: The Armpit of Ontario,” in which he presents his argument against this moniker. Bach is also lead vocalist for the LA-based hardcore band Monk.)
In furthering his career in technology, Bach said he looked at industry hotbeds in Toronto and California.
“I was looking at the middle of December thinking, ‘The beaches of California would look pretty nice right about now,’” he said.
Bach is currently employed by Meta, for which he works on Instagram user experience design.
Although The Bach family’s chosen home is usually a more ideal setting, recent days have seen them join countless other Californians in reacting to widespread environmental crises.
“It’s sort of one of these close enough but far enough kinds of situations, where it’d probably take a good 25 to 30 minutes to drive up to (the fires), but we’re far enough away that we’re only dealing with smoke and ash,” Bach said.
Similar to the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said people are generally only going out for necessities and wearing masks when they do — in this case, to protect themselves from the health impacts of smoke.
“We do the odd grocery store run for simple necessities,” he said. “I’ve been working from home for years now, so I just make the trip from the house to my little home office in the backyard and try not to breathe in too much air while I’m between buildings.”
When he does go out into the public, he said lineups are short and streets are relatively empty.
This could change at the drop of a hat in the event an evacuation order were to be made, he clarified.
With California’s population nearing that of Canada, Bach said there are a lot of people to move out of comparatively small spaces, and that he’s heard of some neighbourhoods where people were quickly jammed bumper to bumper while trying to evacuate.
Although 20 kilometres from the closest fire, Bach said he and Terrie haven’t felt as though they can relax. Their hearts also go out to those whose homes have been lost already, including friends who have in some cases been left with nothing.
Although Greater Sudburians have been hearing about the wildfires and seeing footage of it in wall-to-wall news coverage, Bach said it doesn’t adequately portray its scope, “the sheer size of it, and how difficult it is to deal with fires of this nature, with the speed of the winds, I think, is something you don’t really feel unless you’re here.”
While some politicians and pundits are playing the blame game when it comes to such things as fire protection funding, he said it’s easy for outsiders to point their fingers, but that this is a unique situation. The Santa Ana winds and a dry climate in which there haven’t been any significant rain storms in several months have created tinderbox conditions.
Despite this, Bach said his family is safe and as ready as they can be, plugged into local news coverage and emergency apps to get as early notice as possible in the event danger nears.
Family members in Ontario, including a contingent in Greater Sudbury, have been kept abreast of their situation through what Bach described as constant texting.
“I have a copy/paste ready to go at any moment because the questions are constant,” he said.
In the event they are evacuated, Bach said they’re ready to go and would strategically plan a route in whichever direction would secure them temporary lodging while they wait out the fires.
However, with a blue sky overhead of him while speaking with Sudbury.com on Saturday, Bach said he was optimistic things would settle down in his neighbourhood before it gets to that.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.