The Fire This Time

Redding, CA.  From the Washington Post article linked below.

Tuesday's moody gray skies on the North Coast suggested imminent thunderstorms but it was more a case of a marine layer meeting smoke from fires elsewhere in northern California.  The Carr fire in Redding and beyond is burning an area the size of Denver.  At least until today we've been spared the worst of the smoke, which is drifting down central California to Sacramento and eastward as far as Montana.

Humboldt is receiving evacuees from Redding.  And we're all getting glimpses of the world to come, soon.

From the Mercury News: California’s wildfire season is off to its worst start in 10 years. Through Monday morning, 196,092 acres have burned across the state since Jan. 1 — an area seven times the size of San Francisco and more than double the average by July 9 of the previous five years — according to an analysis of federal and state fire statistics by the Bay Area News Group.

Typically the fire season is at its most intense in September and October.  A hot July combined with a lot of dry brush and trees that died during the drought.  But it goes beyond that.

From the Washington Post: “What we’re seeing in California right now is more destructive, larger fires burning at rates that we have historically never seen,” Jonathan Cox, a Cal Fire spokesman, told CNN on Monday morning.

The Northern Hemisphere is warming faster than the planet as a whole, according to the World Meteorological Organization. “That heat is drying out forests and making them more susceptible to burn. A recent study found Earth’s boreal forests are now burning at a rate unseen in at least 10,000 years.”

“The incidence of large forest fires in the western United States and Alaska has increased since the early 1980s,” the assessment concluded with high confidence, “and is projected to further increase in those regions as the climate warms.”

One wildcard is wind, from strange bursts to fires so intense they create their own tornadoes. The result has been devastation, deaths, burnt homes and evacuations.

One practical harbinger of the new reality:

If you ask the crews on the ground, they will tell you it’s not just the hot and dry weather that’s making fires worse. Firefighters have noted recently that fires are behaving differently than they did in the past. For decades, officials depended on a tried-and-true process to prevent wildfires from spreading: fight them from downhill. Fires naturally expand uphill because heat rises, creating uphill winds, and because the lapping flames extend upward, making uphill grass the easiest target.

But KQED reports that firefighters say that process isn’t working as well anymore — the Carr Fire being an example — and no one has a clear explanation as to why.