Bidaburu says the increasing intensity and the proximity and danger to communities has driven up costs. Enormous pressure on resourcesĬombined, the fires put enormous stress on the US’ firefighting resources. Half of the region was still experiencing extreme drought.Ī progressive snapshot of maps showing the drought conditions of US in the first week of each month noted. Washington and Arizona had their second hottest summer this year.īy the end of November – even after heavy rains doused the Pacific north-west and northern California – 80% of the west remained categorized in severe drought. “It’s just a lousy situation.”Ģ021 delivered the hottest summers on record in California, Nevada, and Oregon. “You are just racking up year after year of high temperatures and below-average precipitation” said Andrew Hoell, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist who serves as co-lead on the agency’s drought taskforce. Higher heat not only dries landscapes faster, making them prone to burn, it also reduces snow, reducing the water flow into rivers and reservoirs. The Windy fire and the KNP Complex fire, which tore through California’s Sequoia & Kings Canyon national parks, resulted in the deaths of up to 3,637 mature sequoia trees – a species that thrived through fires for centuries.įire risk across the American west was exacerbated by historic conditions: a record-breaking drought and unprecedented heatwaves. Soon after, the 221,775-acre Caldor fire became the second. The Dixie fire, which burned close to a million acres in California over three months, became the first fire to cross over the Sierra Nevada range. “There’s no denying that fires are burning hotter and faster.”
“For the first 25 years of my career, fires moved in a certain way and in a certain fashion but now they are acting very uncharacteristically,” said Jon Heggie, CalFire battalion chief. Flames are reaching new heightsįires committed feats never seen before. Horizontal histogram showing the number of acres burned by wildfires across the US since 2015.
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