Decades of extinguishing fires at the first sign of smoke, combined with climate change, laid the groundwork for a massive wildfire in Northern California and several smaller ones in the western U.S. and Canada, experts say.
These fires are advancing faster and are more difficult to fight than those of the past. The only way to prevent future wildfires from becoming so ferocious is to use smaller, controlled fires, as indigenous people have done for centuries, experts say. But they recognize that change will not be easy.
Here are some things you should know about the latest fires and why they’re so wild:
Flames burn hundreds of square kilometers
The Park Fire, the largest wildfire so far this year in California, reached 544 square miles (1,409 square kilometers) on Saturday. The fire started Wednesday when authorities said a man pushed a burning car down an embankment in Chico and then calmly mingled with other people fleeing the scene.
Its intensity and dramatic spread led firefighters to make unwelcome comparisons with the monstrous bonfire that fire raged out of control near Paradise in 2018, killing 85 people and burning 11,000 homes.
Communities elsewhere in the western US and Canada were also besieged on Saturday by fast-moving flames. More than 110 active fires covering 2,800 square miles (7,250 square kilometers) were burning across the U.S. on Friday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
Fires are becoming bigger and more threatening
“Sheltered” is how Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at the Yale School of the Environment, described the recent fires.
Marlon said there aren’t necessarily more wildfires now, but they are bigger and more severe because of the warming atmosphere. “The big message is that seeing extreme wildfires is just part of a series of unnatural disasters that we will continue to see due to climate change,” she said.
Ten of California’s 20 largest fires have occurred in the past five years, said Benjamin Hatchett, a fire forecaster at the Cooperative Institute for Atmospheric Research at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
And he noted that the Park Fire was ranked eighth as of Saturday morning, although it continued to spread. He blamed climate change for creating more variability in weather conditions.
“We have a lot of very, very wet years and very, very dry years,” Hatchett said. “And so we get a lot of this variability that helps accumulate and then dry the fuels.”
Such is the case this year in California, where record temperatures have dried out plant growth that emerged during recent wetter-than-average years, Hatchett said.
“So now we have a really good setup to have these large, widespread wildfires,” Hatchett said. “And we are 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 at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
“They are burning extremely intensely overnight and continue into the next day,” he said. “We are also seeing fires occurring during a longer fire season than we are used to.”
Forests may have trouble recovering
Fires occurring today are sometimes so severe and hot that they transform forests into a different type of ecosystem, Swain said.
“The forest is not coming back in the same way as in many regions,” Swain said.
Part of the issue is that climate change means there will be warmer conditions as plant life returns. In some cases, trees are replaced by invasive grasses that are flammable.
“So climate change has altered the context in which these fires occur,” he said. “And that is affecting not only the intensity and severity of the fires themselves, which is clearly happening right now, but it is also affecting the ability of ecosystems to recover afterwards.”
Putting out fires in the past created problems now
In some parts of the country, such as the Midwest, farmers use fire to control trees, woody shrubs and invasive species. But not so in the western US, where fires have been extinguished in their infancy for decades.
“The problem now is that we have allowed so much fuel to accumulate in some of these places that the fires burn very hot and intense. And that tends to cause more damage than nature normally does in a fire,” said Tim Brown, research professor at the Desert Research Institute and director of the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, Nevada.
Fires were once common in the West because of lightning and indigenous fires, Hatchett said. The practice stopped during colonial rule, but now needs to return, Hatchett said.
“That’s the only way we’re really going to get out of this situation, is to really accept and embrace the use of fire on our terms,” Hatchett said. “Otherwise, we’re going to catch fire in fire terms, which is like what we’re seeing now.”
Doing so isn’t easy because there are no longer large, open landscapes where millions of acres can burn unchecked, Swain acknowledged.
“And that’s the conundrum: This is something we need to do more of. But the practical reality of doing this is anything but simple,” Swain said.
But he said there is no option for dealing with bushfire risk that doesn’t involve fire.
“We will see more and more fire on the ground,” he said. “The question is whether we want to see it in the form of more controllable, mostly beneficial prescribed burns, or these mostly harmful, huge, intense prescribed burns. conflagrations that we are seeing more and more.”
