Decades of snuffing out fires at the first sign of smoke combined with climate change have laid the groundwork for a massive wildfire in northern California and scores of smaller ones across the western U.S. and Canada, experts say.
These fires are moving faster and are harder to fight than those in the past. The only way to stop future wildfires from becoming so ferocious is to use smaller controlled fires, as indigenous people did for centuries, experts say. But they acknowledge that change won’t be easy.
Here are some things to know about the latest fires and why they are so savage:
Blazes scorch hundreds of square miles
The Park Fire, the largest blaze so far this year in California, stood at 544 square miles (1,409 square kilometers) as of Saturday. It ignited Wednesday when authorities said a man pushed a burning car into a gully in Chico and then calmly blended in with others fleeing the scene.
Its intensity and dramatic spread led fire officials to make unwelcome comparisons to the monstrous Camp Fire that fire burned out of control in nearby Paradise in 2018, killing 85 people and torching 11,000 homes.
Communities elsewhere in the U.S. West and Canada also were 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 U.S. on Friday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
Fires are becoming bigger and more threatening
“Amped up” is how Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale’s School of the Environment, described the recent fires.
Marlon said there aren’t necessarily more wildfires now, but they are larger 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 are going to continue seeing because of climate change,” she said.
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Forests may have trouble recovering
The fires that are burning today are sometimes so severe and hot that they transform forests into a different type of ecosystem, Swain said.
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Snuffing out fires in the past created problems now
In parts of the country, like the Midwest, farmers use fire to control trees, woody shrubs and invasive species. But not so in the western U.S., where fires have been extinguished in their infancy for decades.
“The problem now is we’ve allowed so much fuel to build up in some of these places that the fires burn very hot and intense. And that tends to do more damage than what nature typically will do with a fire,” said Tim Brown, a research professor at the Desert Research Institute and director of the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, Nevada.
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