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Smoke and Wildfire in Whatcom County

This morning, Monday, 2 August 2021, the sun rose as a dirty brown disk over the north flank of Sumas Mountain. Last night, the Northwest Clean Air Agency sensor in Columbia Valley north of Kendall was bright red and labelled “Unhealthy.”

Smoky sunrise over the fields where my grandparents battled the forest fire of 1910. Taken 3 August 2021

The air has cleared since early this morning and the sensors are back to “Good” all over the county, but I imagine that is only temporary.

This isn’t the first time wildfire smoke has mingled in the August Whatcom County air. When I was a kid in the 1950s, we often smelled smoke in the late summer and early fall, which my dad said was from logging slash burns, the practice of setting fires to clean up the debris left from a logging operation. I suppose those weren’t technically wildfires, but they were close.

Much earlier, a forest fire burned through the Waschke Road homestead the year after my grandparents were married in June of 1909.

Whatcom County was different then. Much of the lowland was logged for merchantable timber before the turn of the century, but logged over land is not ready for crops. Logging in 1895 was not like forest harvests today.

I’ve seen a few photographs, which I wish I had to display here, that show glimpses of the homestead when my grandparents took possession. Huge stumps, some eight feet in diameter, and eight or ten feet tall dotted the ground covered with slash and brush. Snags, dead standing timber sometimes fifty feet tall, towered over dry fiddle-head and deer ferns mixed with hardhack brush; a havoc that would become the orderly fields my father and grandfather cultivated, and now is still farmed by my son.

Loggers were only interested in trees of a certain size. Too small, and they weren’t worth the trouble. Too large and they were too hard to move. Falling a monster Western Red Cedar or Douglas Fir with axes and misery whips– double-ended hand crosscut saws– could take days. Then the trees had to be limbed and bucked into sniped lengths that ox teams could pull down the skid road, a path through the brush and remaining trees. Greased wooden skids were laid across the way every four feet or so. The oxen pulled the logs on the skids to a saw or shingle mill, the river, or the bay. I heard stories of abandoned giant logs, which farmers had to dynamite to break them into chunks small enough to dispose of— most likely by burning.

Big leaf maple, birch, alder, cottonwood, and vine maple were trash trees left behind for the farmers to contend with.

Following their marriage in 1909, my twenty-four year-old grandfather Gus and his soon pregnant seventeen year-old wife Agnes set themselves to transforming the chaos of stumps, snags, and underbrush into a productive farm.

My grandmother told me a story that took place in September of 1910 in the second year of their marriage. I caution you that this is my grandmother’s recollection fifty years after the event, and my recollection here was formed another sixty or so years after she told the story to me.

Gus and Agnes had planted a few potatoes and peas between the stumps and snags on ground that they had cleared of underbrush. They had one cow, a pig, a horse, and a few chickens that fended for themselves. They lived in a cedar shack Gus had built for them. Gus had dug a shallow well by hand so they didn’t have to walk the half mile to Deer Creek carrying buckets of water. But no electricity, pump, or running water.

Towards the end of August 1910, smoke began to drift in. Gus wasn’t surprised. He had arrived a decade earlier in the North Bellingham-Laurel area with his parents, brothers, and sisters on the Great Northern Railroad. He knew August and September were often filled with smoky haze.

One morning at sunrise, the couple saw a column of smoke rising between their little homestead and Sumas Mountain in the foothills to the east. Snowy Komo Kulshan (Mount Baker) was silhouetted to the south.

They did not think much about it. Something was on fire somewhere almost every day back then. Neighbors gathered to try to smother the flames, but most often, the fire burned itself out. A northeast breeze, now called the Fraser outflow, was building, as it often does in late summer. Unlike the extreme cold of a December or January outflow, a summer northeaster is hot and dry. Wheat and oat thrashing weather.

Fire weather…

The smoke column grew all day. Instead of burning out, the fire was moving down the Nooksack River plain.

As often happens, a cool and damp onshore breeze from the straits to the west blew in towards evening, slowing the fire down. Shortly after dawn, the outflow was back, stronger, hotter, dryer. The fire began to speed closer.

Gus and Agnes had a hard day, clearing away brush and beating down small fires with burlap sacks and shovels as flames flared up from embers carried by the wind. Their livestock had disappeared.

Now comes the part that amazed my grandmother fifty years after the fire.

This summer, the news broadcasts show evacuations, fire crews, and houses burning almost daily. With all our technology and heavy equipment, people still die in forest fires. I shake my head today, wondering if my then young grandparents were wise and brave or foolhardy for what they did next.

When a cool and damp onshore breeze rose in the evening, my young and innocent grandparents laid down their tools, said their prayers, and went to bed. Grandma smiled and giggled when she told me they slept like little rabbits snuggled in their nest.

The next morning, they resumed fighting the fire, which passed by the homestead, and eventually burned itself out in the flats south of Ferndale. Finding their cow, horse, and pig took several days, Grandma said. The chickens came back on their own.

Looking at this story, today, I can hardly believe it. But my grandmother was a truthful person, not given to exaggerating or over-dramatizing.

Contemporary newspapers bear out her story. The Lynden Tribune, 15 September 1910, has account of the fire from Lynden as the town fought to prevent the town from burning. The Blaine Journal also reported on the fire and the fight to save Blaine. An item in the same paper estimated the damage at $1,000,000– 28 billion in 2021 dollars.

My grandparents slept through it.

Note: Wendy McLeod, Assistant Manager of the Lynden Public Library, helped me find the newspaper articles that substantiate my grandmother’s story. Thank you, Wendy!

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Heat Domes and Haying

Late June, early July was haying season on Waschke Road when I was growing up. The heat dome of the past weekend that everyone is talking about brought haying to mind. It was hot work. One hundred degree temperatures have never been common in our part of Whatcom County, but they were not unheard of either.

Hay fields at sunrise.

Waschke Road is about eight and a half miles from the Salish sea and then a good twenty miles of open water intervenes between the beach and the Southern Gulf Islands off Vancouver Island. That stretch of cool water drops the temperature of the on-shore breeze by a few degrees before it reaches the Waschke farm.

I have always been grateful for those gentle on-shore breezes. This weekend was hot, but I learned real heat in the haymow.

The job eased you in. When haying started, the haymow was a shaded and breezy cavern capped with a high cathedral dome ceiling. But as load after load of hay bales arrived from the fields, the top of the stack approached the cobwebbed rafters.

Tier upon tier of bales rise forty feet up in the dusty air, nearly touching the roof. The high stack blocks the airflow and the sun beating down on the roof turns the little space at the top of the barn into a bake oven as the loaf-like bales of hay come in, piping hot, steeped in sun from the fields.

The haymow cathedral dome.

Up near the roof, the haymow crew begged for gaps between the hay loads, a minute to climb down from the mow, feel the onshore breeze cool sweat-soaked jeans and tee-shirt, and gulp down cold well water from the milk house wash hose. Then, before these luxuries began to inspire resentment, scramble back up the long ladder, into the sweltering oven, and make ready for the next onslaught from the fields.

I couldn’t man a haymow today, but I haven’t forgotten why I loved it when I was sixteen. Oh, love it I did. Loved it because my resilient young body could do it, loved it because it gave me a role on the hay crew appreciated by Dad and the older men, who knew how hard the work was because they had been up in the fiery mow many times themselves.

Later, they would trade the heat and dust of the haymow for the adult worries of haying in a marine climate where rain always lurks off-shore, where a cloudless morning never guarantees a dry afternoon, entering a life in which summer rain always threatened to leach nutrients from hay drying in the field.

When spring and summer were over and the grass was no longer lush in the pasture, the cattle ate the hay and converted dry grass into milk and meat that eventually paid the bills and kept life on Waschke Road prosperous.

But when a summer rain washed the grass’s protein into the soil, winter became harder and longer for the family than any afternoon in a fiery summer hay mow; low milk yields, tiny checks from the co-op dairy, and big bills for expensive feed to bolster the poor hay.

Haymows aren’t used much anymore; today’s equipment is fast and powerful. I can only shake my head at the speed farmers today cut, rake, and bale up hay that is stored away by tractors instead of sweating teenagers.

For the time being, I’ll linger on the pleasure of climbing down from the haymow into the on-shore breezes and forget grownup worries. But if these heat domes make a habit of hanging over us, I hope I never forget those fiery haymows.

It’s been hot. Take care.

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The Chip Shortage

Last week, my wife Rebecca, who knows what she wants and when she wants it, decided to replace her aging and worn Android phone, which she can upgrade without paying extra. Fully vaccinated and ready for a post-pandemic treat, she set off for the cellular store. Several hours later, she returned in a sour mood, her old phone still in her purse. The tech at the store told her that she couldn’t upgrade because they had no new phones to offer. The chip shortage.

Want a new car? You may have a wait. The chip shortage.

What a time for a shortage. The pandemic is winding down and the economy is winding up.

The Fourth Industrial Age

The World Economic Forum says we are entering The Fourth Industrial Age where digital models and communications combine with physical processes for speed and efficiency. In the first industrial age, beginning in the 18th century, society began to harness energy to replace human and animal muscle; in the second age, industries were built around mass production in factories; in the third age, automated controls and computerization increased productivity.

The fourth industrial age is just in time for the global pandemic. We can be grateful that computerized gene analysis enabled development of lifesaving covid-19 vaccines in record time. Computer networks have supported productivity and commerce through quarantines and lockdowns. Distributed network management shored up shattered supply chains. As much as we complain about Zoom, social media, and video streaming, they made the lockdowns and quarantines tolerable, kept education alive, and allowed many of to continue to be productive by working at home.

Only the future will reveal where the fourth industrial revolution will take us, but one thing is clear: previous industrial ages ran on coal, oil, hydroelectricity, and nuclear power. The fourth industrial age requires energy, but more than any other commodity, advancement in the fourth age depends on more and better computer chips.

The computer chip

The computer chip started as mechanical relays invented in the early part of the 19th century. A relay is an electrical switch controlled by another electrical circuit. The circuit that flips the switch uses only a few volts to control another stronger electrical current. When you start your car, the current to turn over the engine would quickly burn out the switch on your steering column or dash. This doesn’t happen because a relay isolates the driver operated switch driver from the massive power surge that turns the engine over.

Vacuum tubes, invented it the early 20th century, performed many of the same relay switching functions, but faster. With tubes, came audio amplifiers, radios, and early digital computers.

Transistors, which appeared after WWII, are still faster, more compact, require far less power, and have lifespans measured in decades instead of hours, making the complex digital devices and controls of today practical.

Computer chips are tightly packed arrays of transistors on thin slices of silicon. In 1965, Intel co-founder and engineer, George Moore, predicted that the density of transistors on computer chips would double every one to two years.

This prediction was dubbed “Moore’s Law.” Since its beginning, experts have predicted the impending end of Moore’s law, but after nearly sixty years of exponential growth, the law still holds. The ingenuity of chip technologists, largely from the U.S., has been startling. Advanced chips today have over a billion transistors, that’s more than the number of grains of sand in a five-gallon bucket. Think about wiring together every grain of sand in that bucket in an exact pattern connecting each grain of sand with every other one and you get an idea of just how hard chip manufacturing is. Now, shrink the size of each grain of sand so that they all fit in a few layers the size of a postage stamp.

American engineers figured out not only how to perform this staggering task, they devised ways of using these contraptions to control cars, improve the quality of steel, discover likely covid-19 vaccines. Digital processes power Zoom meetings, deliver pizza, anticipate storm surges in sewers, and broadcast cat photos.

Today, a cutting edge computer chip is undoubtedly the most difficult manufacturing challenge on the planet, requiring hundreds of precision operations, so precise they are calibrated in wavelengths of light. Chips must be small because their speed is limited by the time required for a signal moving near the speed of light to travel from one side of the chip to the other.

Outsourced chip manufacturing

As the source of chip manufacturing technology, you would expect the U.S. to be the leading computer chip manufacturer. It is: Intel and a few other U.S. companies dominate the field. But they do and they don’t. U.S. companies design the chips and the processes to manufacture the chips, but they often outsource the fabrication to firms in Asia, primarily in South Korea and Taiwan. Companies in South Korea and Taiwan have factories on the Chinese mainland where skilled workers are plentiful and wages are low.

And there you have it: U.S. chip innovators depend on manufacturing capacity in mainland China.

Why? Chip manufacturing in China is cheap and the quality is high. The managers of the U.S. chip companies like Intel, Invidia, and AMD are obliged to optimize shareholder value. In corporate America, passing up opportunities for increased profits ends careers. Executives must manufacture chips as cheaply and efficiently as possible. They are compelled by the market to outsource to the U.S.’s leading economic and social competitor, China.

The shortage

But don’t jump to the conclusion that the chip shortage is caused by China. U.S. corporations may have shortsightedly handed chip manufacturing to the Chinese, but the shortage today is not the result of secret directives from Beijing.

The shortage was caused by the rapid progress of the fourth industrial age. From the 1970s, when computer chips first came on the scene, tech companies— computer, smartphone, and networking gear manufacturers— were the primary consumers of chips. But this has changed. Automobiles have become mobile computer data centers. The Internet of Things requires millions of computer chips in home appliances and industrial sensors and controls. Industrial robots must have chips.

Consequently, the chip market has expanded far beyond the tech sector. Adding chip production lines is difficult and slow. Think of the gargantuan private and public effort put into developing vaccine production lines. Chip production lines are more difficult, and the demand is higher. It’s not news that rapid increase in consumption of hard to manufacture commodities precedes shortages.

Covid-19 disruption

The fourth industrial revolution may have blunted the damage from the pandemic, but covid-19 entered the scene at the worst possible time for the chip industry. Let me count the ways.

Chip factories had to slow production as employees became sick with covid-19. These factories have their own supply chains for raw materials, subcomponents, and manufacturing equipment. The global pandemic disrupted these supply chains and sources as well as the factories themselves.

It gets worse. Consumers quit buying. Automobile sales plummeted and the big automakers cut back their orders, falling to the back of the queue. People quit flying. Chip manufacturing relies on cargo space on passenger flights to ship their tiny high-value products and receive materials and subcomponents, but passenger flights were cancelled. The alternative, container ships, are a slow inferior choice for shipping, and they too had their covid-19 problems.

Econ 101

Covid-19 did much more than inhibit chip production. It also increased chip demand. Kids needed computers for remote schooling. Parents needed equipment to work from home. Network usage soared, which required added network gear. In the U.S., by the end of 2020, we were using computing and the computer networks the way that the experts had predicted for 2030.

Increased demand and decreased supply. Sounds like an exercise in disaster prediction from Econ 101. Here we are. Coming out of a pandemic with a roaring fourth stage of industry demand for chips and suppliers struggling to fill orders.

How long it will take to stabilize chip production is hard to predict. Some say by the end of 2021. Things are likely get worse before they get better.

U.S. and China

This is painful, but not all bad, because it draws attention to a glaring problem. Even after the current shortage goes away, the U.S. is still in trouble. Outsourcing of sophisticated manufacturing makes managerial and profit sense, but it is a recipe for disaster. The U.S. rivalry with China is nothing like the U.S.-Soviet cold war. At the height of the cold war, the U.S. depended on the Soviet Union for fish eggs (caviar) and furs, but not much else, and the Soviet resource-based economy didn’t depend on the U.S. That left both sides free to exercise military strategies with little regard for economic consequences.

Today, the U.S. and China are economically intertwined in ways that the U.S. and the Soviets never approached. Don’t expect to see Xi Jinping pounding on a desk with his shoe like Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations in 1960, but expect a series of confrontations and tense maneuvering for advantage. In the cold war with the Soviets, the contest was mainly ideological: state socialism vs. capitalism. Today, the superiority of capitalism is a foregone conclusion in China; the contest is between an authoritarian and a democratic state. Xi manipulates markets to achieve what he perceives as the best deal for the Chinese people. In the U.S., the people direct the market and hope they achieve their goals. If the free market says outsource to China and the people agree, so be it.

A solution

But not all Americans agree that the free market has the best solution to the chip shortage. Some folks, including me, think that we ought to identify the resources we depend upon and act for long term control of our future. They see prioritizing and supporting our own chip manufacturing base as a healthy approach to continuing democracy in the fourth industrial age.

In another venue, we can argue where private enterprise and government enterprise should prevail. But for now, I hope for a government that encourages long-term investment in chip manufacturing and discourages short-sighted profit-taking on outsourcing. We need a landscape in which every off-shore outsource has a vigorous onshore competitor. May the best contestant win, but let’s make sure that onshore contestants are on an even playing field.

We can do this.