California's burning up: firefighters rush to the scene as major wildfires scorch the state

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/19/-sp-california-wildfires-climate-change

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California is burning up. More than three years into a record drought, the state has become a tinderbox, and a single spark can be enough to burn ancient forests, coastal chaparral and any houses that stand in the way.

Just this week, a popular stretch of the Eldorado national forest, halfway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, erupted in flames. The fire, apparently started by an arsonist and fanned by high winds, ripped through more than 70,000 acres in three days, causing California’s governor, Jerry Brown, to declare a state of emergency.

More than 4,000 firefighters have rushed to the scene from around the country deploying planes, helicopters and hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and fire retardant.

Further north, near Mount Shasta, a seemingly innocuous brush fire near the main interstate freeway – far from any big forest – overwhelmed the small town of Weed on Monday, destroying 150 homes, two churches and the offices of the town’s main employer, a lumber processing mill.

In all, 10 major fires are raging, along with a couple of hundred classified as minor. If they are not in populated areas they tend not to generate headlines. But one fire, in the Klamath National Forest near the Oregon border, has burned through 130,000 areas and has been going for a month.

All that’s before the start of the most dangerous season for wildfires – California’s hot, dry autumn, when so-called Santa Ana winds blow in from the desert like a convection heater on full blast.

“There have always been droughts in California, but the severity of this one is different,” said John Laird, the head of California’s state Natural Resources Agency. “We’ve already had more than 4,000 fires this year. And they’re not just breaking out in big forests. It can happen anywhere.”

Fire season traditionally starts in mid-to-late summer and runs until the Santa Anas are washed away by the first rains – around mid-October in southern California and a little sooner in the north. This year, however, the really bad fires started in May, when suburban communities on the narrow coastal strip north of San Diego were trapped in an inferno of smoke and burning forest.

Laird cited a study showing that fire seasons in the American west were now lasting more than 70 days longer than they did a generation ago.

“If you look at the 20 largest, most damaging fires in California in the last century, over half, 12, have occurred just since 2002. We’re now experiencing the driest three consecutive years since records have been kept in California,” he said. “The pattern and the statistics suggest that climate change has a significant role.”

That is not, of course, the only explanation. California’s ever-booming population – now at 38 million – puts constant pressure on the natural landscape, especially when people fulfil their fantasies of living in the mountains or the forests. Firefighters paid to protect people and property suppress the natural fire cycle, leading to a dangerous build-up in combustible material on the forest floors. When a fire does break out, it tends to burn longer and further because the natural firebreaks that might have existed from previous, smaller fires are not there.

Tom Scott, a natural resources specialist with the University of California, said his abiding concern was the tendency of developers to build in fire-prone canyons and on wooded hillsides, often then relying on public authorities to create so-called “defensible space” around the homes and draining away fire-fighting resources that could otherwise be deployed to keep the fire cycle more manageable.

“People are constantly launching stealth cities, new communities within wild lands,which often have no mayor, no governance, no public services, yet on the weekends may attract 150,000 people,” he said. “Fire experts talk about creating firebreaks, but people don’t want their land modified …

“It’s almost a distraction to talk about climate change when we have smaller areas of wilderness that could disappear in the next 10-15 years. We could start losing species with fires this large.”

There is no argument, however, about the impact of the drought,which has gone on so long that trees sucking ever deeper in the ground for moisture are starting to run dry. Beetles and other small insects vital to the ecosystem are starting to die off. If towns like Weed are vulnerable to devastating fires, it means communities on the mountain edges of Los Angeles, San Diego, the San Francisco bay area and any number of other population centres are vulnerable too.

The next month could be even more devastating than the last, but that is not even the biggest worry confronting Laird and other public officials. Theoretically, this is an El Nino year – a climate event determined by tide patterns in the Pacific that usually leads to heavier winter rainfall – but nobody is betting that the drought will soon be over.

“If El Nino fizzles and we go into a fourth year of drought,” Scott said, “everything will be much more hellish.”