California Wildfires

When wildfires occur, emergency personnel often evacuate areas at high risk of burning. However, counties across California have carved out exceptions, allowing agricultural operators and employees to reenter into evacuated areas to continue essential agricultural work. We are conducting an evaluation of Sonoma County’s “Ag Pass” evacuation access program and relevant state health and safety laws to assess their impacts on agricultural workers’ health, safety, economic security, and data privacy during wildfires. 

We’ve partnered UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health/UC Cooperative Extension, public health undergraduate students, and a local Community Engagement Team who conducted a survey of one thousand farmworkers in Sonoma County about their experiences working during wildfires, and the short-term and long-term impacts of wildfires on their health and economic livelihoods. We then co-hosted two workshops with farmworkers and three community forums with government stakeholders and the general public in Sonoma to share our findings and solicit feedback on policy recommendations to improve the Ag Pass program. These findings and subsequent feedback have directly informed our policy recommendations to strengthen protections for agricultural workers returning to work under the Sonoma Ag Pass Program; and to improve state and local laws to protect the health, physical safety, economic livelihood, and data privacy of agricultural workers in wildfire evacuation zones.