I believe that the point of the article is to describe the experience of living in California during the wildfires to people who are not living the experience. The New Yorker magazine's readership is largely in New York—or so the magazine believes, since it has a special section describing what goes on in New York.

title to get you to click so they get ad venue

Expect more of these sorts of articles from NYC-based media. Whenever NYC gets insecure, its media starts churning out more articles like this about other parts of the country. Unfortunately, its knowledge of areas outside of the TriState area can be pretty spotty and superficial. If you want, you can be an intellectual smokejumper and correct some of the more egregious errors online.

to get people on the east coast more motivated about climate change