Wildfires in California 2020: Why Today’s Fires Are So Unusual

A beautiful, sudden onset of wildfires burning through California threatens to create cities and send stinging smoke across major cities and across much of the United States. It creates an epic composite disaster whose ingredients have been brewing for years.

Firefighters have grouped some of the smaller fires in an area into complexes to coordinate their response. The largest of these is the SCU Lightning Complex. It is Friday morning burning 229,000 acres across parts of the southern Bay Area of ​​San Francisco, including Santa Clara and Alameda counties. The SCU Lightning Complex is now 10 percent covered, but officials expect “critical rates of spread” if wind blows.

To the north, the LNU Lighting Complex near Napa has killed at least four people, burned more than 219,000 acres and destroyed or damaged 600 structures. Thousands were forced to evacuate. The fire had been contained 7 percent since Friday morning, and officials expect the flames to spread further.

These are just two of dozens of major fires currently raging across the Golden State. Together, all of these fires in California have burned close to 600,000 acres in just under a week.

It is not only the size of the fires that matters; some of the extinguishers are in coastal areas that do not burn completely, which threatens the iconic redwoods of the state.

The blaze was triggered by a massive dry lightning storm earlier this week across many parts of the state but concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“We had close to 11,000 strikes in a matter of three days,” said Brice Bennett, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). “With an already hot weather pattern and very, very dry conditions here in California, with those lightning strikes coming through, more than 367 new fires were started.”

Smoke, soot and ash from the fires also shook Northern California in the dirtiest air in the world at various points during the week.

Wildfires are nothing new to Californians, and many are growing weary of the heat, smoke, and evacuations as fires re-emerge in areas that have been burning in the recent past. But this week’s blushes stand out for their scale, timing, locations, and intensity, even during recent record-breaking seasons.

And the wildfires are just one of several harrowing disasters currently affecting California. The state is suspended by a record-breaking heat wave, with several days in a row temperatures reaching three digits in three places, even at night. Temperatures in Death Valley above 130 degrees Fahrenheit. This is called leading to blackouts, as utilities struggle to meet the demand for cooling.

All the while, the Covid-19 pandemic is taking root throughout the state, with the number of new cases increasing over the past two weeks and making the already difficult task of wildfires even more difficult to control.

Here are the factors that have fueled the recent fires and are now complicating efforts to control them.

Extreme heat, hurricanes, and climate change set the stage for California fires

The lightning storm around the San Francisco Bay Area that caused many of the current fires in California was a rare occurrence.

“The last time we had such a thing was more than a decade ago, actually,” Bennett said. The fact that lightning started these fires is also noteworthy. The vast majority of wildfires in California originate from human resources – powerlines, arson, ignored campfires, and so forth.

But the fires would not have been so bad had it not been for the extreme heat that the state has been battling for weeks.

“This is a large, large prolonged heat wave characterized not only by hot temperatures during the day, but also absorbing warm temperatures during the day, and an unusual amount of humidity,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles and a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It turns out that increased humidity plays a role in why there are so many fires now.”

A devastating tropical storm in the eastern Pacific earlier this month sent a plume of moisture across California. Amidst the scorching heat, the moisture formed clouds that generated immense amounts of wind, thunder and lightning, but very little rain. “The humidity was high enough to produce this thunder, but not high enough to produce significant flooding precipitation that would reduce the risk of fire,” Swain said.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Much of California’s vegetation was also parched and primed to burn, making sure this would be an exceptionally bad fire started in February, as the state emerged from one of its driest winters on record. This was then followed by an abnormally hot spring. “There were a number of unusually significant hot waves at the beginning of this season in both northern and southern California,” Swain said.

And California is now experiencing the effects of climate change, which is manifesting itself in fires. The weather in California is getting more volatile. Temperatures are also rising, causing the state’s forests, meadows and chapels to dry out even more. The state has already suffered millions of dead trees from years of drought and pests such as headaches. More heat could further stress these ecosystems.

“It’s not just how hot the heat waves are; it’s how hot the rest of the time, ”Swain said. “What’s really important is to keep warm and dry over seasons and years.”

Some of the current fires in California are in areas that do not burn regularly

It is important to remember that fires are a normal part of California’s ecology, from the coniferous forests of the Sierra Nevada to the capricious shrubbery in the south. Periodic extinguishers eliminate declining vegetation, restore nutrients to the soil, and help germinate plants.

However, people continue to make every wildfire in California worse. By suppressing naturally occurring fires, fuel is collected in forests and shrubs, increasing the danger of fires. People are also building closer to areas that are envious of burning. This increases the chance of starting fire and increases the damage toll of the blows. Humans have also introduced invasive plant species such as eucalyptus trees, which have spread throughout California and are easy to grow. And burning fossil fuels emits greenhouse gases that heat up the planet, causing the amount of vegetation that can burn.

Even with this background, some of the fires in California are on fire because they rage in places that do not burn completely.

“I think what’s the key to understanding is that different parts of California have very different normal fire seasons,” said Crystal Kolden, an assistant professor of fire science at the University of California Merced. ‘And that’s in part because California is such a great state. It has really variable topography and different vegetation like ecosystems in the state. ”

Some of the more notable fires at the moment are in the California coast of redwood forests. On Thursday, office buildings in Big Basin Redwoods State Park burned, and fires damaged some of the park’s steep trees. Some redwoods in the park still smolder as they burn from the inside.

Randy Vazquez / MediaNews Group / The Mercury News via Getty Images

Because coastal forests are affected by marine weather systems, they are much cooler and retain more moisture than the pine forests of the Sierra Nevada and other inland areas. The coastal forests burn periodically and are home to many species that have adapted to fire, but they rarely catch fire in the summer.

That they are now on fire is remarkable, a product of high atmospheric pressure over the area that could raise heat and overwhelm the cooling effect of the ocean. “Those coastal areas are incredibly dry, incredibly hot relative to normal, and that dry and hot state had this potential to have really explosive fires,” Kolden said.

Covid-19 adds a wallop to California fires

The Covid-19 pandemic has rattled every part of society, and arson efforts are not immune. “It has definitely affected our response, in the first place in our disrupted crews,” Bennett said.

California often relies on labor in prisons to bolster its arson efforts, with nearly 200 resident fire crews. Captures are paid between $ 2 and $ 5 per day, plus $ 1 per hour when fighting a fire. But with severe Covid-19 prison outbreaks in the state, some inmates were released to humiliate too many people. Others were hampered by infections, and many remain under quarantine. The number of available included fire crews is almost halved.

Anticipating a severe fire season, officials appointed an additional 800 seasonal firefighters, but they must take extra precautionary measures. Fire crews remain essentially in small bubbles, where they live and work with each other, to help limit coronavirus transmission.

In base camps where firefighters rest and thank, officials have allocated more space for workers to maintain social distance.

The state is also facing a budget crisis, with the economic downturn due to pandemics. As a result, some fire prevention maintenance measures – such as removing dry grass from roads and buildings – are lost.

As the Californians fled the fire, Covid-19 made it more difficult to coordinate evacuations and shelters. The declining air quality of wildfires is also a threat to people with Covid-19, as exposure to air pollution can damage the airways and make people more susceptible to respiratory infection. And extreme heat also reduces the impact on public health of Covid-19, as people spend more time in confined spaces together to prevent the heat.

And the current round of extinguishing can take weeks for extinction, raising concerns that stiff autumn winds – the Santa Ana winds in the south and the Diablo winds in the north – could spread the flames again.

California is facing even higher temperatures throughout the weekend and forecasters warn that more dry lightning may be in store.

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