California heat has dried out tall grass, making fire outlook worrisome
The heart of fire season is still weeks away, but more than twice the usual acreage has burned in California for this time in the fire season.
With weeks still to go before the heart of fire season hits, more than 242,000 acres have already burned in California — about double the typical area for this time of year, according to statistics from the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The number of fires that have started so far is typical for this period of the summer, but intense early summer heat waves have dried out the landscape and raised the wildfire risk, turning a seasonal outlook that had looked relatively rosy into a major question mark.
“The wildfire situation throughout the West has continued to escalate, and unfortunately I think will escalate considerably further in the days to come,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said in a briefing Thursday. “The last 30 days have been the warmest period on record for a very large portion of California and the West.”
Flames from the Thompson Fire in Oroville, Calif., on July 2.Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu via Getty Images file A vehicle is engulfed in flames as the Thompson Fire burns in Oroville, Calif., on July 2. Ethan Swope / AP file More than 2,000 firefighters are assigned to the Lake Fire northwest of Santa Barbara, which started July 5 and took off quickly in tall grass. It has grown to more than 38,000 acres and is now 73% contained. Another 2,900 firefighters are working to control the Shelly Fire, which has burned more than 15,000 acres on the eastern side of the Klamath National Forest. Because California experienced two consecutive wet winters, the National Interagency Fire Center had predicted modest fire activity in the state this summer and fall. But the agency upgraded its seasonal forecast this month, saying the heat had rapidly cured grasses that grew high during the rainy weather.
“We’ve had, you know, two actually really great winters where we’ve had atmospheric rivers come in and really help pull California out of drought. But the other side to that is that we now have a lot of extra grass and brush that has dried out and is ready to burn,” said Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior research associate at Climate Central, a non-profit research organization.
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