A fire season like no other. California and other states along the west coast of the U.S. are facing unprecedented times during one of the most active fire seasons to date.
On Monday, Cal Fire, the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, reported that over 16,500 firefighters are working to extinguish 28 major wildfires across California. What were once 39 separate fires, initially caused by lightning, is now the largest single fire that the state has documented, beating California’s 2018 fire season.
The Cal Fire Department (CFD) also reports that this year alone, California wildfires have destroyed 3.3 million acres, resulting in damages larger than the state of Connecticut. Forest fires, which are expected during the dry heat seasons, are growing in frequency and duration, displacing thousands who are forced to evacuate their homes.
Dr. Dorian J. Burnette, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Memphis, said that this is the typical time that the west experiences a fire season.
“You know, their rainy season is really the winter, and it's not there yet. So, there's always been this danger of fire in California and other places in the western United States during the late summer into the fall months,” he said.
Burnette said many states out west have a complex drought index leaving them especially vulnerable during the fire season.
“What we're seeing out in the west is that we are not really detecting as much change in presentation, and we are detecting a change in temperature which is affecting the evapotranspiration rates,” Burnette said.
Evapotranspiration changes how much moisture is lost from vegetation and soil, and how much goes back to the atmosphere.
“[Forest fires] can be started from just simple natural factors like lightning, or people burning stuff or electrical power lines get in the way of overgrown vegetation,” he said. “So there are those effects too, but anthropogenic climate change definitely has a fingerprint on this.”
Burnette said that anthropogenic climate change essentially has juiced up the atmosphere on steroids.
“It's the complex combination of the temperature increase as well as an increase in the overall season length,” he said, making extreme weather events, like fire season, all the more intense.
And it is not just California that is on fire. The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reports that, as of Sept. 15, 2020, “Nationally, 87 large wildland fires have burned over 4.7 million acres. [While] the majority of the fire activity is in California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington.”
States that typically do not experience an active fire season are now struggling with the consequences of global warming and the unpredictable nature of forest fires.
Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon said to The New York Times, “This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history.”
The National Wildfire Coordinating Group reported that, as of Sept. 15, 2020, fires in Beachie Creek, Oregon, had burned 190,138 acres.
In an account by the Statesman Journal, a family searched for their missing 13-year-old son, after being separated as they evacuated their burning home in Beachie Creek, Oregon. The search ended when the boy’s remains were found in a vehicle just off the family’s property. Wyatt Tofte, 13, died in an attempt to flee the flames along with his grandmother Peggy Mosso, 71, and Duke, the family dog, in the vehicle with him.
With a year that has already been complicated by COVID, the West waits for the fires to clear, hoping there is a normal to return to.
