Years of snuffing out fires at the first sign of smoke along with climate change have laid the foundation for a massive wildfire in northern California and scores of smaller ones across the western US and Canada, experts say.
These fires are moving faster and are more difficult to fight than in the past. The only way to stop future wildfires from being so ferocious is to use smaller controlled fires, as indigenous people have done for centuries, experts say. But they admit that change will not be easy.
Here are some things to know about the latest fires and why they are so fierce:
Scorch blazes hundreds of square miles
The Park Fire, the largest fire so far in California this year, was at 544 square miles (1,409 square kilometers) as of Saturday. A fire broke out Wednesday when authorities said a man pushed a burning car into a culvert in Chico and then calmly merged with others fleeing the scene.
Its intensity and dramatic spread have drawn fire officials unwelcome comparisons to the monstrous Camp Fire that burned out of control in nearby Paradise in 2018, killing 85 people and torching 11,000 homes.
Communities elsewhere in the Western US and Canada were also under siege Saturday from fast-moving flames. More than 110 active fires covering 2,800 square miles (7,250 square kilometers) were burning in the US on Friday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
Fires are becoming more and more threatening
“Amped up” is how Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at the Yale School of the Environment, described the recent fires.
Marlon said that there are not necessarily more wildfires now, but that they are bigger and more intense because of the warming atmosphere. “The big message is that seeing extreme wildfires is just one of the series of unnatural disasters that we’re going to continue to see because of climate change,” she said.
Ten of the 20 largest fires in California occurred in the past five years, said Benjamin Hatchett, a fire meteorologist with the Cooperative Institute for Atmospheric Research at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins.
And he noted that the Park Fire was in eighth place as of Saturday morning, even as it dissipated. He blamed climate change for creating more variability in weather conditions.
“We’ve had a lot of very wet years and very dry years,” Hatchett said.
Such is the case this year in California, when record-setting temperatures dried up plant growth that had emerged in recent wetter-than-average years, Hatchett said.
“So now we have a very good setup for having these large, widespread fires,” Hatchett said. “And we’re starting to push the limits of the availability of firefighting resources.”
These fires don’t even give firefighters a chance to rest at night, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California, Los Angeles and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
“They’re burning hard right through the night and just continuing into the next day,” he said. “We’re also burning fires over a longer fire season than we used to.”
Forests may struggle to recover
Sometimes the fires burning today are so intense and hot that they shift forests to another type of ecosystem, Swain said.
“The forest is not coming back the way it was in many regions,” Swain said.
Part of the issue is that climate change means warmer conditions as plants come back. In some cases, trees are replaced by invasive grasses that are themselves flammable.
“So climate change has changed the context in which these fires are happening,” he said. “And that affects not only the intensity and severity of the fires themselves, which is clear at this point, but it also affects the ability of ecosystems to recover afterward.”
Spinning fires in the past have now created problems
In parts of the country, like the Midwest, farmers use fire to control trees, woody shrubs and invasive species. But that was not the case in the western US, where fires have been extinguished in the beginning for many years.
“The problem now is that we have allowed so much fuel in some of these places that the fires are very hot and very intense. And that tends to cause more damage than nature would normally do with fire,” said Tim Brown, a research professor at the Desert Research Institute and director of the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, Nevada.
Fires caused by lightning strikes and native burning were once common in the West, Hatchett said. The practice stopped during colonial settlement, but now needs to be brought back, Hatchett said.
“That’s the only way we’re really going to get there, is to accept the use of fire and accept it on our terms,” Hatchett said. “Otherwise we will be going through fire on the terms of the fire, which is similar to what we are seeing right now.”
That’s not easy to do because there are no longer large open landscapes where millions of acres can be burned unchecked, Swain acknowledged.
“And that’s kind of the conundrum: This is something we need to be doing more of. But the practical reality of doing that is not simple at all,” said Swain.
But he said there is no option to address the non-fire risk of wildfire.
“We will see more and more fire on the ground,” he said. “The question is do we want to see it in the form of more manageable prescribed burns, which are primarily beneficial, or in these primarily harmful, massive, intense burns. conflagrations we are seeing more.”