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When there’s no way out, should we go down?
On August 20, 1910, a “battering ram of forced air” swept across the plains of western Idaho and collided with several of the hundreds of small wildfires that had been left to simmer in the Bitterroot Mountains by the five-year-old U.S. Forest Service.
By the time the wind-fanned flames reached the trees above the mining town of Wallace, Idaho, later that day, the sky was so dark from smoke that it would go on to prevent ships 500 miles away from navigating by the stars. A forest ranger named Ed Pulaski was working on the ridge above Wallace with his crew cutting fire lines when the Big Blowup bore down on them and he realized they wouldn’t be able to outrun the flames.
And so, in what is now wildland firefighting legend, Pulaski drove his men underground.
Sheltering from a forest fire in an abandoned mineshaft was far from ideal: Pulaski held the panicked men at gunpoint to keep them from dashing back out into the fire, and he and the others eventually fell unconscious from smoke inhalation. But even now, more than a century later, there are few good options available for people who become trapped during wildfires, a problem that has caused some emergency managers, rural citizens, and entrepreneurs to consider similarly desperate — and subterranean — options.
“We have standards for tornado shelters,” Alexander Maranghides, a fire protection engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the author of a major ongoing assessment of the deadly 2018 Camp fire in Paradise, California, told me. “We don’t have anything right now for fire shelters.”
That’s partially because, in the United States, evacuation has long been the preferred emergency response to wildfires that pose a threat to human life. But there are times when that method fails. Evacuation notification systems can be glitchy or the alerts sent too late. Roads get cut off and people get trapped trying to get out of their neighborhoods. Residents, for whatever reason, are unable to respond quickly to an evacuation notice, or they unwisely decide to “wait and see” if the fire gets bad, and by then it’s too late. “If you can get out, you always want to get out,” Maranghides said. “But if you cannot get out, you don’t want to burn in your car. You want to have another option and among them — I’m not going to call it a ‘Plan B,’ I’m going to call it the ‘Plan A-2.’ Because we need to plan for those zero notification events.”
One promising, albeit harrowing, option has been TRAs, or “temporary refuge shelters” — typically unplanned, open areas along evacuation routes like parking lots where trapped citizens can gather and be defended by firefighters. Hardening places like schools or hospitals so they can serve as refuges of last resort is also an option, though it’s difficult and complex and, if done improperly, can actually add fuel for the fire.
Beyond that, you start getting into more outside-the-box ideas.
Tom Cova is one such thinker. He has been studying wildfire evacuations for three decades, and when I spoke to him recently to discuss the problem of traffic jams during fire evacuations, he told me that in Australia, “they have fire bunkers — private bunkers that are kind of like Cold War bunkers in the backyard, designed to shelter [people] for a few minutes if the fire’s passing.”
Unbeknownst to me at the time, Cova has even gone on record to say he’d consider one for himself if he lived on a dead-end road in California’s chaparral country. “My family and I would not get in our car and try to navigate the smoke and flames with bumper-to-bumper taillights,” he told the Los Angeles Times back in 2008. “We would just calmly open up, just like they do in Tornado Alley — open the trap door and head downstairs. Wait 20 minutes, maybe less, and come back and extinguish the embers around the home.”
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Bunker-curious Americans can get easily discouraged, though. For one thing, Australia’s bushfires burn through areas fast; if you’re sheltering underground from an American forest fire, you could be in your bunker for considerably longer. For another, there are very few guidelines available for such bunkers and as of yet, no U.S. regulations; even Australia, where there are standards, generally recommends against using fire bunkers except at the highest-risk sites. Then there is the fact that there is almost no existing American fire bunker market if you wanted to buy one, anyway. “You would think more people would have wildfire shelters, but they don’t,” Ron Hubbard, the CEO of Atlas Survival Shelters, told me. “Even when there was a big fire not that many years ago and all those people died in Paradise … it has never kicked in.”
Hubbard is technically in the nuclear fallout shelter business, though he’s found a niche market selling a paired-down version of his marquee survival cellar, the GarNado, to people in wildfire-prone areas. “How many do I sell a year? It’s not a lot,” he admitted. “I thought it would have been a lot more. You’d think I’d have sold hundreds of them, but I doubt — I’d be lucky if I sell 10 in a year.” Another retailer I spoke to, Natural Disaster Survival Products, offers “inground fire safety shelters” but told me that despite some active interest, “no one has bought one yet. They are expensive and not affordable for many.”
Installing a Wildfire Bunkerwww.youtube.com
Hubbard stands by his bunker’s design, which uses a two-door system similar to what is recommended by Diamond, California’s Oak Hill Fire Safe Council, one of the few U.S. fire councils that has issued fire bunker guidance. The idea is that the double doors (and the underground chamber, insulated by piled soil) will help to minimize exposure to the radiant heat from wildfires, which can reach up to 2,000 degrees. It’s typically this superheated air, not the flames themselves, that kills you during a wildfire; one breath can singe your lungs so badly that you suffocate. “Imagine moving closer and closer to a whistling kettle, through its steam, until finally your lips wrap themselves around the spout and you suck in with deep and frequent breaths,” Matthew Desmond describes vividly and gruesomely in his book On the Fireline.
This is also why proper installation and maintenance are essential when it comes to the effectiveness of a bunker: The area around the shelter needs to be kept totally clear, like a helicopter landing pad, Hubbard stressed. “You’d be stupid to put a fire shelter underneath a giant oak tree that’s gonna burn for six hours,” he pointed out.
If there is “a weakness, an Achilles heel of the shelter,” though, “it’s the amount of air that’s inside it,” Hubbard said. Since wildfire shelters have to be airtight to protect against smoke and toxic gases, it means you only have a limited time before you begin to risk suffocation inside. You can extend the clock, theoretically, by using oxygen tanks, although this is part of the reason Australia tends to recommend against fire bunkers in all but the most extreme cases: “Getting to a tiny bunker and relying on cans of air in very unpleasant conditions and being unable to see out and monitor things would be a very unpleasant few hours,” Alan March, an urban planning professor at the University of Melbourne, once told the Los Angeles Times.
Private fire bunkers, with their limited capacities, can start to feel like they epitomize the every-man-for-himself mentality that has gotten some wildfire-prone communities into this mess in the first place. Something I’ve heard over and over again from fire experts is that planning for wildfire can’t happen only at the individual level. NIST’s Maranghides explained, for example, that “if you move your shelter away from your house, but it’s next to the neighbor’s house, and your neighbor’s house catches on fire, preventing you from using your shelter, you’re going to have a problem.” A bigger-picture view is almost always necessary, whether it’s clearing roadside vegetation along exit routes or creating pre-planned and identifiable safety zones within a neighborhood.
To that end, bunkers are far from a community-level solution — it’s impractical to have a cavernous, airtight, underground chamber by the local school filled with 1,000 oxygen tanks — and they’re not a realistic option for most homeowners in rural communities, either. Beyond requiring a large eyesore of cleared space for installation on one’s property, they’re expensive; Hubbard’s fire shelter starts at $30,000, and that’s before the oxygen tanks and masks (and the training and maintenance involved in using such equipment) are added.
The biggest concern of all when it comes to wildfire bunkers, though, might be the false sense of security they give their owners. Evacuation notice compliance is already a problem for fire managers; by some estimates, as many as three-quarters of people in wildfire communities hesitate or outright ignore evacuation notices when they are issued, even when not immediately evacuating is one of the most dangerous things you can do. But by having a shelter in one’s backyard, people may start to feel overconfident about their safety and linger longer, or decide outright to “shelter in place,” putting themselves and first responders in unnecessary danger.
As far as Hubbard is aware, no one has actually ridden out a wildfire in one of his shelters yet (people tend to install them, and then he never hears from them again). But there have been reported cases of homemade fire bunkers failing, including a retired firefighter who perished in a cement bunker on his property with his wife in Colorado’s East Troublesome fire in 2020.
Even Pulaski’s celebrated escape down the mineshaft resulted in tragedy. Though the forest ranger is remembered as a hero for his quick thinking and the 40 men he saved from the Big Blowup, the stories tend to gloss over the five men who either suffocated or drowned in the shallow water in the mine while unconscious from the smoke.
Some things just don’t change over 100 years: You will always have the greatest chance of surviving a fire by not being in one at all.
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Analysts are betting that the stop work order won’t last. But the risks for the developer could be more serious.
The Danish offshore wind company Orsted was already in trouble. It was looking to raise about half of its market value in new cash because it couldn’t sell stakes in its existing projects. The market hated that idea, and the stock plunged almost 30% following the announcement of the offering. That was two weeks ago.
The stock has now plunged again by 16% to a record low on Monday. That follows the announcement late Friday night that the Department of the Interior had issued a stop work order for the company’s Revolution Wind project, off the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut. This would allow regulators “to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States,” the DOI’s letter said. The project is already 80% complete, according to the company, and was due to be finished and operating by next year.
While Donald Trump’s antipathy towards the wind industry — and especially the offshore wind industry — is no secret, analysts were not convinced the order would be a death blow to project, let alone Orsted. But it’s still quite bad news.
“This is another setback for Orsted, and the U.S. offshore wind industry,” Jefferies analyst Ahmed Farman wrote in a note to clients on Sunday. “The question now is whether a deal can be struck to restart the project like Empire Wind,” the New York offshore wind farm that received a similar stop work order in April, only to have it lifted in May.
Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop tacked in the same direction on Monday. “We expect the order to be lifted, as was the case for Equinor’s Empire Wind project off the coast of New York last May,” he wrote in a note to clients, adding an intriguing post-script: “The Empire Wind case suggests President Donald Trump’s administration uses stop-work orders to exert pressure on East Coast Democratic governors regarding specific issues.”
When the federal government lifted its stop work order on Empire Wind, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum wrote on X that he was “encouraged by Governor Hochul’s comments about her willingness to move forward on critical pipeline capacity,” likely referring to two formerly moribund pipeline proposals meant to carry shale gas from Pennsylvania into the Northeast. Hochul herself denied there was any quid pro quo between the project restarting and any pipeline developments. Meanwhile, the White House said days later that Hochul had “caved.”
The natural question becomes, then, what can the governors of Rhode Island and Connecticut offer Trump? At least so far, the states’ Democratic governors have criticized the administration for issuing the stop work order and said they will “pursue every avenue to reverse the decision to halt work on Revolution Wind.”
Yet they have no obvious card to play, Allen Brooks, a former Wall Street analyst and a senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics, told me. “They were not blocking pipelines the way the state of New York was, so there’s not much they can do,” he said.
Even if Interior does reverse the order, the risk of a catastrophic outcome for Orsted has certainly gone up. The company’s rights issue, where existing shareholders have an option to expand their stakes at a discount, is intended to raise 60 billion Danish kroner, or around $9 billion, with some 5 billion kroner, or $800 million, due to complete Revolution. Jefferies has estimated that Revolution, which Orsted owns half of, will ultimately cost the company $4 billion.
The administration’s active hostility toward wind development “calls into question that business model,” Brooks told me. “There’s going to be a lot of questions as to whether [offshore wind developers] are going to be able to raise money.”
The Danish government, which is the majority shareholder of Orsted, said soon after the announcement that it would participate in the fundraising. The company reaffirmed that patronage on Monday, saying that it has the “continued support and commitment to the rights issue from its majority shareholder.”
Orsted’s big drop will also drag down the fortunes of its neighbor Norway, via the latter’s majority state-owned wind power company Equinor, which bought a 10% stake in Orsted late last year.
“Their investment decision looks terrible,” Brooks told me.
At the close of trading in Europe, Orsted’s market capitalization stood at around $12 billion. That’s about a third less than where it sat before the share sale announcement.
In a worst case scenario involving the cancellation of both Revolution and Sunrise Wind, another troubled offshore project planned to serve customers in Massachusetts, Fulop predicts that the long-run value of Orsted would go down enough that it would have to offer its new shares at a greater discount — which would, of course, raise less money.
The best case scenario may be that Orsted will join its Scandinavian peer in resolving a hostage negotiation with the White House, with billions of dollars of investment and over 1,000 jobs in the balance.
“The Empire Wind case suggests President Donald Trump’s administration uses stop-work orders to exert pressure on East Coast Democratic governors regarding specific issues,” Fulop wrote. Right now, it’s workers, investors, elected officials, and New England ratepayers feeling the pressure.
Using the Supercharger network with a non-Tesla is great — except for one big, awkward problem.
You can drive your life away and never notice the little arrow on the dashboard — the one next to the fuel canister icon that points out which side of the car the gas cap is on. The arrow is a fun piece of everyday design that has inspired many a know-it-all friend or TikTok. But while the intel it relays can be helpful if you’re driving a rental car, or are just generally forgetful, it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme what side your fuel filler is on. Service stations are so big that there’s generally enough space to park at an open pump in whatever orientation a vehicle demands.
That’s not quite the case with electric cars.
When I test-drove the new Hyundai Ioniq 9 this summer, the industrial designers had included their own version of the little arrow to point out the location of the EV’s charging port. In the Ioniq 9’s case, it’s on the passenger’s side, the opposite of where you’d find the port on a Tesla. Turns out, that’s a problem. On our trip from L.A. to San Jose, Hyundai's navigation system directed me to a busy Tesla Supercharger just off the interstate in the parking lot of a Denny’s. But because of the big EV’s backward port placement, I needed two empty stalls next to each other — both of which I wound up blocking when I backed in to charge. The episode is an example of how we screwed over the present by not thinking hard enough when we built the infrastructure of the recent past.
Let’s back up. In the opening stage of the EV race, the charging question was split between Tesla and everybody else. The other electric carmakers adopted a few shared plug standards. But just like with gas cars, where the left-or-right placement of the gas cap seemed to vary arbitrarily vehicle to vehicle, there was no standardized placement of the charging port. Because all manner of different EVs pulled in, companies like Electrify America and Chargepoint built their chargers with cords long enough to reach either side of a car.
Tesla, meanwhile, built out its excellent but vertically integrated Supercharger network with only Tesla cars in mind. In most cases, a station amounted to eight or more parking spaces all in a row. The cable that came off each charging post was only long enough to reach the driver’s side rear, where all the standardized ports on Teslas can be found. The thinking made sense at the time. Other EVs weren’t allowed to use the Supercharger network. Why, then, would you pay for extra cabling to reach the other side of the vehicle?
It became a big issue late in 2022. At that point, Musk made Tesla’s proprietary plug an open-source standard and encouraged the other carmakers to adopt it. One by one they fell in line. The other car companies pledged to use the newly renamed North American Charging Standard, or NACS, in their future EVs. Then Tesla began to open many, but not all, of its stations to Rivians, Hyundais, and other electric cars.
Which leads us to today. The Ioniq 9, which began deliveries this summer, comes with a NACS port. This allows drivers to use Tesla stations without the need to keep an annoying dongle handy. But because Hyundai put the port on the opposite side, the car is oriented in the opposite direction from the way hundreds or thousands of Supercharger stations are set up. Suppose you find an empty spot between two Teslas and back in — the plug that could reach your passenger’s side port actually belongs to the stall next to you, and is in use by the EV parked there. The available cord, the one meant for the stall you actually parked in, can’t reach over to the passenger’s side.
The result is a mess. Find two open stalls next to each other and you can make it work, though it means you’re taking up both of them (stealing the cord meant for the neighboring stall and blocking the cord meant for the one you’re parked in). At giant stations with dozens of plugs, this is no big deal. At smaller ones with just 12 or 16 plugs, it’s a nuisance. I’ve walked out and moved the Rivian I was test-driving before I had all the electricity I wanted because I felt guilty about blocking two stalls. To avoid this breach of etiquette you might need to park illegally, leaving your EV in a non-spot or in a place where it’s blocking the sidewalk just so it can reach the plug. (Says Tesla FAQ: “In some cases you might have to park over the line in order to charge comfortably. Avoid parking diagonally to reach the cable and try to obstruct as few charge posts as possible.)
Some relief from this short-sightnedness is coming. Tesla’s new “V4” stations that are currently opening around the world are built with this complexity in mind and include longer cables and an orientation meant to reach either side of the vehicle. The buildout of EV chargers of all kinds is slated to continue even with the Trump administration’s opposition to funding them, and new stations should be flexible to any kind of electric car. And the idea of making sure EVs of any size and shape can charge is picking up steam. For example, many of the stations in Rivian’s Adventure Network include at least one stall where the charging post is off to the side of an extra-long parking space so that an EV towing a trailer can reach its charging port.
Yet for now, we’re stuck with what we’ve already built. There are more than 2,500 Tesla Supercharger stations in the U.S., representing more than 30,000 individual plugs, and most of those were built with the V2 and V3 versions of Tesla’s technology that have this orientation problem. For years to come, many of those stations will be the best or only option for non-Tesla EVs on a road trip, which means we’re all in for some extra inconvenience.
On $20 billion in lost projects, Alligator Alcatraz’s closure, and Amazon state’s rally
Current conditions: The highest wave measured from Hurricane Erin was 45 feet by a buoy located 150 miles off North Carolina’s Cape Hetteras • Intense rainfall is flooding Rajasthan in India • Wildfires continue raging across North America and southern Europe.
The Trump administration issued a stop-work order to halt construction of Orsted’s flagship project off the coast of Rhode Island. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management halted work on the Revolution Wind project while its regulators were “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States,” a letter from the agency stated. The project was nearly completed, and already connected to the grid. The Danish state-owned Orsted said it was “evaluating all options to resolve the matter expeditiously.”
Earlier this month, the company put out a bid for $9.4 billion from the stock market to fund its work in the U.S. amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote of the sale, “While the market had been expecting Orsted to raise capital in some form, the scale of the raise is about twice what was anticipated,” causing its stock to plunge almost 30%. The White House has aggressively targeted policies that benefit wind energy in recent weeks. Following the Friday announcement, shares in Orsted tumbled 17% to a record low.
Trump’s clampdown on wind and solar has sent the industry spiraling in recent weeks as federal agencies limit access to clean energy tax credits and rework rules to disfavor the industry’s two largest sources of energy. Already, $18.6 billion worth of clean energy projects have been canceled this year, compared to just $827 million last year, according to data from Atlas Public Policy’s Clean Economy Tracker cited in the Financial Times.
Trump has blamed renewables for the rising price of electricity. But data Matthew covered last week showed that renewables are, if anything, correlated with lower prices. Instead, he wrote, at the “top of the list” of reasons electricity prices are surging “is the physical reality of the grid itself,” the poles and wires required to send energy into people’s homes and businesses. “Beyond that, extreme weather, natural gas prices, and data center-induced demand growth all play a part.”
The entrance to Florida's state-managed immigrant detention facility. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Together with the state of Florida, the Trump administration rushed to build what it calls “Alligator Alcatraz,” a detention facility designed to hold several thousand migrants at a time in southern Florida. In its haste to complete the facility, however, the government failed to conduct the proper environmental reviews, according to a federal judge who ordered its closure late last week, The Wall Street Journal reported. Back in June, a pair of nonprofits filed a lawsuit alleging that the government had failed to conduct assessments of what impact the facility would have on endangered animals such as the Florida panther and the Florida bonneted bat. The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida later joined the lawsuit.
The Trump administration argued that the law in question, the National Environmental Policy Act, only applies to federal projects, whereas this one was state-driven, an argument Judge Kathleen Williams rejected, according to the Journal. “Every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades,” she wrote. “This Order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”
The eight countries that ring the Amazon rainforest pledged support over the weekend for a global pool of financing for conservation. In a joint declaration, the Amazonian nations — Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela — expressed support for preserving the rainforest but stopped short of endorsing any curbs on fossil fuels. The statement comes as South America has emerged as the world’s hottest oil patch, with new discoveries moving forward off the coasts of Guyana and Brazil and Argentina advancing plans for a fracking boom.
“Abrupt changes” like the precipitous loss of sea ice are unfolding in Antarctica, highlighting the growing threat global warming poses to the frozen continent, according to a new paper in the journal Nature. These changes could push the Antarctic ecosystem past a point of no return, the authors wrote.
“We’re seeing a whole range of abrupt and surprising changes developing across Antarctica, but these aren’t happening in isolation,” climate scientist Nerilie Abram, lead author of the paper, told Grist. “When we change one part of the system, that has knock-on effects that worsen the changes in other parts of the system. And we’re talking about changes that also have global consequences.”
Bad news for vegans who evangelize their diets on good health grounds: New research found no increased risk of death “associated with higher intake of animal protein. In fact, the data showed a modest but significant reduction in cancer-related mortality among those who ate more animal protein.” That, however, doesn’t change the huge difference in emissions between red meat and plant food products.