The warning is all too familiar: Significant vegetation growth and a projected hotter-than-normal summer could lead to a dangerous wildfire season.
So are some of the calls for action: proposals for more efficient forest management, which often are controversial, and financial assistance to deal with the effects of heat and wildfire smoke.
There was a notion that heavy winter rains and snow would tamp down the fire threat, or at least cause a slow start to the season. It doesn’t appear that way, with several large wildfires of burning across the state last week.
As of Thursday, more than 90,000 acres had burned in California this year, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Cal Fire called that a “staggering” increase from the 5,863 acres burned during the same period last year.
Much of that acreage has been consumed by three blazes — the Sites fire in Colusa County, Post fire in northern Los Angeles County, and the Corral fire earlier this month in San Joaquin County.
Some of the fires have forced evacuations.
Vegetation growth has been supercharged by back-to-back very wet winters. Hot weather already has dried out a lot of it, particularly at lower elevations. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric istration outlook is for a warmer than usual summer across much of the nation.
Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist and extreme-weather expert, said in an online briefing last week that fuller drying of vegetation on higher ground is likely later in the summer.
“We could in fact see a very active finish to fire season 2024, but we aren’t there yet,” Swain said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Swain added that he did not make similar predictions for the past two years as heavy rains and a deep snowpack resulted in comparatively less wildfire activity.
“This is a season where I do expect to see that transition back toward a really active fire regime across much of California and the West — maybe a little bit less so at very high elevations, but everywhere else, we’re going to see greatly increased levels of fire activity this year relative to the past couple of years,” Swain said.
Long-term climate change often is blamed for contributing to greater wildfire intensity. But more immediate weather patterns can play a part, such as the ongoing shift from typically wetter El Niño conditions to a drier La Niña.
As the wildfires burn, there’s more discussion about whether forests and wildlands can be better managed to reduce the number and size of fires.
Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, last week teamed up with House Resources Committee Chair Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., to introduce the Fix Our Forests Act, which aims to expedite environmental reviews and curtail litigation that have delayed projects such as tree-thinning and undergrowth clearing in high-risk fire areas.
Advocates say clearing out smaller trees and brush and dead trees can help keep smaller fires from exploding into big ones. Peters’ staff said the streamlining provisions still allow ample opportunity for review and court challenges.
Critics have said thinning can negatively impact wildlife that depend on the forest for food and habitat and are leery of anything that might close off avenues to challenge such projects.
Though there’s broad disagreement, thinning and other forest management tools have proved effective in combating wildfires, according to some experts.
In California, a state program has won praise for streamlining regulations for wildland management, but it has its critics, such as the Sierra Club.
The California Vegetation Treatment Program is an environmental impact review process covering 20 million acres of non-federal, fire-prone land in California. The program enables efficiencies in the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) that can cut review timelines from years to months, according to the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force.
The task force, created by Gov. Gavin Newsom, said this approach reduces redundancies without sacrificing environmental quality — though not everyone agrees — by allowing project sponsors to build on known and verified environmental analysis as they begin their environmental review for individual projects.
Increasingly, the state is using “prescribed burns” on brush and other fuels to help prevent the start of fires and mitigate the spread of wildfires. California has a goal to manage 1 million wildland acres with beneficial fire annually by 2025.
One thing virtually no one disagrees with is that heat waves and wildfire smoke can be health hazards.
The Center for Biological Diversity on Monday petitioned the Federal Emergency Management Agency to recognize extreme heat and wildfire smoke as “major disasters.”
The group said that would unlock federal funding for local governments for things such as cooling centers, air filtration systems and solar and clean energy storage projects.
Major disasters defined by the Stafford Act, which empowers FEMA, are catastrophes caused by, among other things, hurricanes, tornados, fires, floods and earthquakes.
The petitioning group wants the rules amended to include wildfire smoke, which can affect areas far from the fires, and extreme heat.
“Heat is the leading disaster-related killer in the United States, killing more people than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined, according to the National Weather Service,” the Center for Biological Diversity said in a release.
“. . . Meanwhile, communities are breathing in unhealthy levels of smoke as wildfires grow in frequency and intensity. The average U.S. resident in 2023 breathed in more wildfire smoke than in any year since 2006.”
While the intensity of wildfires over the year have triggered an evolving debate about the best approaches to deal with them, some shifts have been subtle.
Massive outbreaks of fires in diverse natural terrain even led to a change in 2001 in the message from Smokey Bear, the fire prevention icon of the U.S. Forest Service.
No longer does Smokey caution that “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.” Now Smokey says “Only YOU can prevent wildfires.”
What they said
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (@CAL_FIRE) in a Wednesday post on X.
“95% of these wildfires are human-caused, fueled by dry grasses and strong winds.”
