New simulations in three lakeside communities have revealed potentially fatal threats to residents, visitors and workers in flight — particularly during the coinciding peaks of tourism and wildfire seasons.  

Severe wildfires have become an increasing threat to the entire Lake Tahoe region, where fire-prone forests give way to vacation hotspots and crowded roadways. 

During the 2021 Caldor Fire, an infernal blaze burned nearly 222,000 acres over 69 days — destroying more than 1,000 structures and requiring more than 50,000 people to flee.  

The independent analysis, commissioned by the group TahoeCleanAir.org, focused on three areas: Douglas, West Shore and Eldorado.  

Approximately 23,000 people reside in the bounds of the last region, the El Dorado/South Lake Study Area, which includes several communities and parts of Lake Tahoe’s biggest city, South Lake. 

In addition to locals, there are more than 6,000 lodging rooms and camp sites in this region, as well as more than 2,300 short-term rentals, according to the report.   

Catering to this area’s hundreds of thousands of annual tourists are high concentrations of shopping, dining and recreation activities — served by limited roadway capacity, the authors warned.  

Depending on traffic conditions and road closures — which could create choke points — AI-powered simulations found that it could take between 8.5 and 11 hours to evacuate this summertime hotspot.  

The Douglas zone, on the Nevada side of the lake, has a local population that is about 5,406, as well as nearly 3,000 lodging rooms and more than 900 short-term rentals for seasonal vacationers, per the report.  

The researchers found that depending on traffic conditions, it could take 5 to 7.5 hours to evacuate this popular area.  

As for the West Shore, where researchers estimated a local population of about 4,346, the report found that fleeing this area could take from 4 to 8.5 hours.  

The region has only about 483 campsites and lodging rooms and 500 short-term rentals, but throngs of annual visitors still frequent the West Shore, according to the report. 

At the same time, the relatively isolated lakeshore communities located in this zone are accessible only by narrow neighborhood roads leading to two evacuation routes, the authors warned.  

“The carrying capacity in the Tahoe Basin is already beyond strained,” Doug Flaherty of TahoeCleanAir.org said in a statement.  

Flaherty, a former southern California Fire Combat Battalion Chief, emphasized a “need for Tahoe policy makers to provide better, more transparent public safety planning.”  

“Officials need to take a reality-based approach to land use planning decisions to help avoid issues experienced in other major wildfires,” he added. 

Welcome to The Hill’s Sustainability newsletter, I’m Sharon Udasin — every week we follow the latest moves in the growing battle over sustainability in the U.S. and around the world.

Chemists from the University of California, Berkeley, say they have devised a new type of material capable of absorbing carbon dioxide from ambient air — and doing so efficiently. 

Seizing CO2 from air: Capturing and storing CO2 has become critical to reducing atmospheric greenhouse gases, the scientists stressed. 

• But today’s “carbon capture” technologies only work well for concentrated sources of carbon like power plant exhaust.
• Those methods cannot easily trap CO2 from ambient air, where levels are hundreds of times lower than those in flue gases.   

Overcoming obstacles: However, the UC Berkeley researchers said they have identified a new type of material that may be able to do the formerly impossible. 

• The porous material captures CO2 from ambient air without degradation by water or other pollutants — one of the hurdles of today’s direct air capture technologies.
• The chemists published the blueprint for their material — called a covalent organic framework (COF) — on Wednesday in Nature. 

A tall order: “Trapping CO2 from air is a very challenging problem,” senior author Omar Yaghi, a chemistry professor at UC Berkeley, said in a statement.  

• The process requires a lot of energy, and the material needs to be water stable, recyclable and have a high CO2 capacity.
• “It’s a tall order for a material,” he added. 

Patience and strength: But Yaghi and his team have been working for two decades to develop COFs that are strong enough to prevail in this process.  

• Ultimately, they designed a material that is held together by carbon-carbon and carbon-nitrogen double bonds, which are among the strongest in nature.
• Within the pores of the material are “amines” — carbon chains attached to nitrogen atoms — that facilitate the uptake of CO2.  

Passing the Berkeley test: “We took a powder of this material, put it in a tube, and we passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform,” Yaghi said.  

“It was beautiful,” he continued. “It cleaned the air entirely of CO2. Everything.”  

On par with a tree: Less than half a pound of the material could absorb as much CO2 as an average tree does, or about 44 pounds, according to lead author Zihui Zhou, a UC Berkeley graduate student.  

The new material could also easily be transplanted into existing carbon capture systems, Yaghi added.