LOS ANGELES — Southern California is facing a potentially treacherous wildfire season this year, as climate change, drought and extreme heat conspire to bake vegetation and prime the landscape for burning, officials say.
Standing beneath the blazing sun at the start of a triple-digit heat wave, fire officials from various state, county and federal agencies gathered in Los Angeles on Thursday to warn residents about the current conditions and what the coming months may hold.
“We know the drought is here. We know the fuels are flammable. We know now, with water restrictions, the vegetation around our homes are becoming flammable,” said Dustin Gardner, chief of the Ventura County Fire Department. “So we know the threat is here, and we know the threat is real.”
Officials in recent years have been sounding the alarm about the state’s changing conditions, with wildfires across the West growing hotter, faster and harder to fight due to increasing heat and dryness. Last year, more than 2.5 million acres burned in California — including the 960,000-acre Dixie fire, the state’s second-largest blaze on record.
This year, fuel moisture levels — or the amount of water in the vegetation — is at least four months ahead of where it should be in terms of dryness, officials said. In some cases, fuels are 40% drier than on this same day in 2016, which was, at the time, among the driest they’d ever seen.
“We’re seeing it year after year for the last few years,” Gardner said. “We’re getting hotter, drier, faster.”
The warning comes as much of California heads into a dangerous heat wave, with temperatures predicted to soar as high as 106 degrees in Sacramento on Friday and 117 in Borrego Springs Saturday. Last year, a similar June heat wave helped kick off Northern California’s fire season with the Sugar and Beckwourth Complex fires.
After the driest-ever January, February and March, nearly all of California is classified under severe, extreme or exceptional drought, according to U.S. Drought Monitor.
Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the confluence of hazards is transforming summer into “danger season” in the U.S.
“What we see is when snowpack gets very low in spring, we tend to have a little more fire activity in the subsequent wildfire season,” she said. “And we also know that when it’s exceptionally warm, we’re more likely to see drier conditions because heat can exacerbate drought conditions and make them worse.”
Increased fire activity also means the increased probability of flames where people live, Dahl said, particularly as more people move into the area known as the wildland-urban interface.
Already this year, more than 2,000 fires have burned about 11,000 acres in the state, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. In May, the devastating Coastal fire in Orange County destroyed an estimated 20 homes.
That that blaze ignited on a “normal day” only exemplified the region’s growing risk, said Orange County Fire Authority Chief Brian Fennessy.
“That was not a Santa Ana day, the humidity was more than 70%, the temperatures were in the mid-70s,” he said. “The big difference is the fuels … That vegetation was dry.”
Fennessy said conditions are likely to only worsen as the state heads into what is typically the hottest, driest part of the year.
“It’s climate change,” he said. “I’m not a scientist, but I’ve been doing this 40-plus years, and I’ve never seen fire spread the way it is. I’ve never seen what we’re experiencing today.”
