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A house burns in the Zogg Fire near Ono, California, in September.
A house burns in the Zogg Fire near Ono, California, in September. Photograph: Ethan Swope/AP
A house burns in the Zogg Fire near Ono, California, in September. Photograph: Ethan Swope/AP

How bad will California’s fire season be? Experts on the threat – and what can be done

This article is more than 2 years old

After the third-driest year ever recorded in the state, California risks disaster just months after a devastating 2020

Hillsides typically decked in colorful flowers are parched and splotched with brown. The so-called desert “superbloom” never materialized.

California is facing a critically dry year. America’s most populous state received only half its average amount of rain this spring, making 2021 the third-driest year it has ever recorded.

The dry conditions raise fears the state could see another devastating wildfire season, mere months after some of the worst blazes in the state’s recorded history scorched 4m acres from north to south.

Officials, researchers and policy analysts are calling on communities to get ready. “It is going to be another smoky summer,” said Craig Clements, a professor and director of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center at San Jose State University.

Clements leads a team of researchers that examines the moisture levels in plants, and he called this year’s findings “grim”.

“The plants are going to be more burnable, earlier on. No matter what, our fuels are dry in the summer. Now, they are getting worse.”

How bad is it?

California gets 75% of its year’s precipitation in the winter and spring, with just three months –December, January and February – typically determining the state’s yearly water levels.

In 2021, those months have passed with far fewer rainstorms than normal. The snowpack that helps carry the state through its drier months is melting quickly, and major state reservoirs are already at just 50% capacity.

“Wet season is over,” the National Integrated Drought Information System tweeted last week. “Wildfire season is coming.”

Drought maps used by federal agencies now show swaths of the west blotched in darkened hues of orange and red, used to denote “extreme” and “exceptional”, the highest drought levels.

The area across NorCal experiencing the driest water year since at least 1979 (in dark brown) has expanded dramatically over the last 2+ weeks, now extending all the way to the Oregon border. #CAwx #CAwater pic.twitter.com/S5lF7lxqKi

— US StormWatch (@GreatWinter2017) April 13, 2021

Last year marked the state’s largest wildfire season on record, with close to 10,500 structures devoured by the flames and 33 people lost lives. The flames were fueled by dry winds and record-high temperatures, both of which have exacerbated the low moisture levels in plants and trees, making them more likely to turn into matchsticks if an ignition occurs.

“There are lots of places in the western US that are going to be problematic this summer,” said Clements, explaining that the fuel-moisture content in the plants he studies is 40% lower than in the average year and 18% lower than the previous low.

For the first time ever, Clements said, his team had found no new growth sprouting on the shrubs that cover the chaparral landscape in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where the researchers usually collect clippings to test fuel-moisture content.

April is typically when the live chaparral has the highest moisture content. With levels so low, they are far more prone to burning and will dry or die much earlier in the season.

“I am not totally freaking out,” Clements said. “But it could be bad. It depends on how hot the summer is, but the drought is really going to be playing a role with these fuels.”

This year’s early-onset dryness is a symptom of a larger trend – fueled by rising temperatures – and the region is settling into what scientists expect could be a long-term drought.

California ecosystems are adapted to fires and dry periods have plagued the region for centuries. But the most recent National Climate Assessment, a report authored by 13 federal agencies and published in 2018, predicted that, with hotter temperatures, droughts are likely to be longer, more frequent, and more severe. Seventeen of the largest wildfires in California have happened in the 21st century, noted Glen MacDonald, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

A roadside sign warns motorists of extreme fire danger on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, in Oakland, California, in October. Photograph: Jose Carlos Fajardo/AP

Some scientists believe the trend is evidence that the climate crisis is driving the western US into a “megadrought” worse than any in recorded history. Pairing 1,200 years of tree-ring data with climate models, a study from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory published in Science last year found that rising temperatures are fueling conditions that are already outpacing the driest years – and they expect it will only get worse.

“Increasing temperatures give us increasing aridity,” MacDonald said, “and we can portion a large part of that to increased greenhouse gases and climate change.”

What can we do about it?

The California department of forestry and fire protection (Cal Fire) is already preparing. Along with adding 1,400 additional firefighters to their ranks, the agency is calling in seasonal and specialty crews earlier than it typically would. Though it is considered one of the most sophisticated and well-funded firefighting teams in the world, the agency has struggled to keep up with the ever-growing number of fire disasters that ignite across the west year after year.

And this month, the California governor approved a plan to allocate $536m to hire the additional firefighters and fund fire mitigation efforts, including improving forest management, culling the parched plants, and making infrastructure and homes more fire-resistant. But experts say resources still fall short in the face of the increasing risks.

“Clearly, the cavalry cannot keep up with the threat,” MacDonald said. “If you are living anywhere near a fuel source, you really have to be prepared for the fact that fire suppression may not be able to keep the fire out of your neighborhood.

“And your house doesn’t have to be next to the forest or next to the chaparral – these fires will travel through neighborhoods,” he added. “We have to accept that we are going to have fires. Even solving climate change – which we have to do – isn’t going to take fire out of the California landscape.”

Along with greater focus on mitigation and sustainable management, policy analysts are pushing for greater public education efforts, and for reframing the risks.

“These fires happen in some of the most predictable times, when the winds are high and it’s dry and hot. That would be the time to push the public awareness about being smart about ignitions,” said Henry McCann, a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center.

“Human-caused wildfires tend to be the most prevalent ignition source,” he said, arguing that the state should do more to prepare its citizens for “the inevitability of a wildfire happening at the household and the community level”.

Stephanie Pincetl, a professor and director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, agreed and said the state needed to take more steps to adapt. “California has always burned,” she said. “But we live in a hysteria about fire because we put people in the wrong place.”

Though environmental conditions exacerbate risks, a key problem lies with people, according to Pincetl. “There is nothing wild about these fires. These are human-created conditions that induce higher risk,” she said. “We need to acknowledge that these are our problems that we created, and if we are going to deal with it we have to start where the problem begins.”

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