California fires: Why there will be more disasters like Paradise

...From 1980 to 1990, roughly 300,000 to 400,000 acres a year burned in California. Last year, 1.4 million acres burned. This year, so far, 1.8 million acres — an area six times the city of Los Angeles — of federal, state and private land has been incinerated. Similar trends are afoot in other Western states. “We don’t even say ‘fire season’ any more. It’s year round,” said Scott McLean, deputy chief of Cal Fire, the state’s primary firefighting agency. “The climate change we are dealing with is related to that.”Put another way, 15 of the 20 largest fires in California history have occurred since 2000. Four of the five largest have happened since 2012. And the two all-time biggest in terms of acres burned — the Mendocino Complex Fire centered in Lake County this summer and the Thomas Fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties last December — both happened in the last 12 months.
“We’re in a new abnormal,” a grim Gov. Jerry Brown said last Sunday at a news conference to discuss the Paradise disaster. “Things like this will be part of our future. Things like this and worse.”
Even Ryan Zinke, Interior Secretary in the Trump administration, which has been skeptical, if not hostile, of climate science, conceded the changing conditions on Wednesday during a visit to Paradise. Zinke said he did not “want to finger point” and said there were multiple reasons for the worsening fires. But those include the fact that “fire seasons have gotten longer and the temperatures have gotten hotter,” Zinke said. Centuries ago, lightning and Native Americans clearing land burned more acres a year than are burning now in California. But those fires were mostly low-intensity affairs, helping clear dead underbrush. Today, because fire crews have put out blazes for generations, many forests have so much dead and living vegetation that they often explode out of control, wiping out large trees and seeds.  More than a century ago, it was not uncommon for whole towns to burn down. The 1871 Peshtigo Fire killed about 1,500 people in Wisconsin and Michigan, with so many fatalities that there weren’t enough survivors in some communities to identify the dead. The Great Fire of 1910 burned 3 million acres in Washington, Idaho and Montana, killing 86 and sending smoke plumes to New York. Afterward, the U.S. Forest Service set a policy of putting out fires by 10 a.m. the next morning, and radios, helicopters, planes and other equipment improved safety dramatically over the generations. But now, with hotter, larger fires growing ever more intense in a warming world, creating “fire tornadoes” and walls of flame hundreds of feet tall, whole towns could again burn down, fire experts say. “This is the kind of urban conflagration Americans thought they had banished in the early 20th century,” wrote Stephen Pyne, an Arizona State University fire historian, last week, of the Paradise disaster. “It’s like watching measles or polio return.”...MORE