The climate crisis has left the west much warmer and drier, baking moisture from the overgrowth, and setting the stage for bigger, more erratic burns. The larger and deadlier wildfires in recent years have increased as a history of fire suppression enabled landscapes to grow dense with vegetation. Zagaris compared the wildfires in California this year to 2008, when few blazes burned early but a midsummer barrage of lightning hit the state “and before we knew it there were 2,000 fires burning in the northern part of the state”.įires are an important part of the California climate, and are essential to the health of landscapes and ecosystems across the state, but conditions have shifted, causing some blazes to become catastrophic. “But the fuels, the vegetation, are much dryer than they were last year. We’re not quite as far along as we were at this time last year,” he said. There are two major blazes burning in California, which is experiencing a fairly typical ramp-up to what is sure to be an active fire year once the state’s infamous Santa Ana and Diablo wind events begin in September, said Kim Zagaris, an adviser with the Western Fire Chiefs Association, which maps wildfires across the country. Smoke drifted more than 200 miles (322km) to reach part of northern California and Nevada. Smoke also produced poor visibility to the north of the fire during the day and across the fire at night, CalFire said.

On Monday, smoke from the fire shrouded Yosemite national park’s vistas in a thick grey haze, as the air quality index (AQI) pushed past 250, a level categorised as very unhealthy. The cause of the fire remained under investigation. “We urge people to evacuate when told,” she said. On Monday, helicopters had dropped 300,000 gallons of water on the fire, the agency said.Įvacuations were in place on Monday for more than 6,000 people living across a several-mile span of the sparsely populated fire zone, though a handful of residents defied the orders and stayed behind, said Adrienne Freeman, a US Forest Service spokesperson. Sixty percent of the state’s land area is classified by the federal government as being in extreme drought.“Persistent drought, critically dry fuels and tree mortality continue to contribute to the fire’s spread,” CalFire said on Tuesday morning, but humidity levels were slightly higher, aiding crews in their fire fight. But a combination of rising temperatures from climate change and an abundance of ignitable vegetation - including tens of millions of trees that were killed during a previous drought a decade ago - have made the state’s forests particularly vulnerable to fire. However, July is still early in the state’s traditional fire season, which runs through the summer and well into autumn, when the threat rises of more potentially lethal wind-driven wildfires.Ĭalifornia forests have always burned during the dry months.

The Oak fire is by far the largest wildfire in the state so far this year, besting the Washburn fire, which burned 4,900 acres, according to a tally by Cal Fire. Last year at this time, the state was battling the Dixie fire, which burned nearly a million acres - more than 60 times the area of the Oak fire - and crested the Sierra to burn down the eastern slopes of the mountain range, a relatively rare occurrence. But so far this year, the state has managed to avoid the type of megafire that it has experienced in years past. The Washburn fire is now all but extinguished.Īs California fell deeper into a second year of drought in the spring, officials warned of a potentially catastrophic 2022 fire season across the state’s desiccated landscape.

That blaze started earlier this month and at one point threatened the park’s Mariposa Grove of sequoias, some of the world’s oldest trees. The fire closed a highway leading to Yosemite, which is still recovering from the Washburn fire.

California wildfires