Verde’s employees also went without paychecks for the two weeks the restaurant was shut down. Chavarria says that a month of sales for the restaurant is more than $100,000. Tourism is about 63 percent of the Tahoe basin’s economy, according to a 2018 report from Tahoe Prosperity Center.īetween the slowdown in business due to smoke and the evacuation, Verde lost several weeks of revenue. “That’s not a slow weekend in Tahoe,” says Chavarria. Domi Chavarria poses for a portrait at his restaurant Verde Mexican Rotisserie in South Lake Tahoe on Oct. Some costs are more immediate - the cost of Chavarria’s rotted food, for instance, and the fact that the fire took place over Labor Day weekend. Nor does it include the lost economic activity caused by residents evacuating, and it doesn’t take into account the healthcare costs associated with wildfire smoke exposure. And, says Harris, that preliminary estimate is low: It doesn’t include the losses in sectors like rental homes or recreation businesses. It estimates the combined losses of El Dorado and Nevada’s Douglas County at $93 million. The initial analysis of the Caldor Fire’s economic impact was prepared by Tom Harris, an economist at the University of Nevada, Reno, for the Tahoe Prosperity Center, an economic development organization for the Lake Tahoe Basin. Your guide to the 2022 general election in California The different costs of wildfires But with more research being funded, this may be more feasible to help the state better understand the economic and ecological impacts so we can continue to make science-based informed policy decisions,” Williams wrote in an email. “Those would always be a moving target since health impacts can occur years later. The state does not track or estimate the cost of wildfires in a way that accounts for public health costs or ecological damage on a regular basis, confirmed Heather Williams, communications director for California Natural Resources Agency. She said it took only about a month of digging into the question to realize: ”Oh no, you can’t come up with a number, this is actually impossible with the existing data.” “There isn’t a statewide systematic tracking effort to figure out these costs,” says Feo. Right now, we don’t have a comprehensive picture of the economic harm wildfires cause each year, according to Teresa Feo, senior science officer at the California Council on Science and Technology and lead author of a 2020 report from the council on the cost of wildfires in California. The costs of business disruption, the cost of damage to uninsured homes, the cost of ecosystem damage, and the cost of secondary health impacts - such as those caused by wildfire smoke - aren’t being tracked. For instance, tracking the costs systematically over several years could help policymakers figure out which fire prevention and mitigation strategies are most cost effective.īut right now, California has an incomplete understanding of how much wildfires cost the state each year. Knowing the true cost of wildfires could spur more ambitious action from both government and the private sector, experts say. None of it was covered by his insurance.įood inventory from the Verde Mexican Rotisserie restaurant had to be discarded after a two-week evacuation order due to the Caldor Fire in South Lake Tahoe. He estimates the lost inventory was worth between $10,000 and $13,000. “All that stuff, none of that’s made to last weeks - it’s all made to last days,” says Chavarria. Produce wilted proteins went bad prepared sauces couldn’t be used. When the evacuation orders came down, Verde was stocked with food, almost all of which went bad during the more than two weeks the restaurant ultimately remained closed. Smoke had blanketed the city, and the tourists had mostly left. In South Lake Tahoe, Domi Chavarria, co-owner of Verde Mexican Rotisserie, felt the devastation of the Caldor Fire even before the city was evacuated in August. And yet, the threat of the fast approaching Caldor Fire cost surrounding El Dorado County tens of millions of dollars, if not more. Not a single structure burned down in the city of South Lake Tahoe. But right now, California has a mostly incomplete picture of how much fires cost the state each year. Wildfires, and the economic disruption they cause, have a large economic impact. A preliminary estimate shows that the Caldor Fire cost tens of millions in lost economic activity.
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