Welcome to fire season: Summer fires hitting hard and early--in climatology terms, 'we're screwed'

The official warning came more than a month ago.

“The 2016 wildfire season is off to a worrisome start,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a May 17 briefing. “Southern California, the Great Basin in Nevada, portions of the southwest, and even Florida and Hawaii are particularly vulnerable this year.

“In California, more than 40 million trees have died, becoming dry fuel for wildfire.”

And now, it appears Vilsack’s prediction is becoming reality: This year to date, fires have burned nearly three times as many U.S. acres as in the same timespan last year, according to the U.S. Forest Service. We’re nearing 2 million acres charred nationwide, with nearly half the country’s fires concentrated in California and Arizona.

Almost 8,000 of those fire-ravaged acres sit in Santa Barbara County, where the Sherpa Fire forced mandatory evacuations in Refugio Canyon and closures at El Capitan Canyon, Refugio State Beach, and El Capitan State Beach.

This uptick in fire severity is in step with patterns seen over the past decade, according to Vilsack.

“We keep setting records we don’t want to see beat,” he said at the briefing. He cited National Interagency Fire Center statistics: 16 of the most “historically significant wildfires on record” occurred in the last 10 years.

The culprit? Bill Patzert, an oceanographer with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is putting his money on one theory: “More development, more people, more fire.”

“A lot of it is due to Mother Nature, and a lot of it is human nature,” Patzert told the Sun. “Where we live, there are too many people living in or near fire-prone areas.”

It’s actually healthy for wildland areas to burn every couple of decades, he said. Occasional burns keep dead brush from building up and creating much more hazardous fire potential.

But when people move into wildlands, those areas no longer have the luxury of burning occasionally—because once an area becomes residential, all fires are bad fires.

So when one of these spots goes more than half a century without burning and one day catches on fire, the decades of built-up dead vegetation—fuel—can create catastrophic results. According to Patzert, this is why the Sherpa Fire got so big so quickly.

“One of the villains here is Smokey the Bear. Fight forest fires? That’s way wrong. We should let more of these forest fires burn, but it’s a dilemma now because there are too many rich people living in the wild areas,” Patzert said. “These are areas that haven’t burned in 60 years, and, of course, with the punishing drought, they’re crispy dry and they’re good to go.”

CalFire spokesman Daniel Berlant agreed that population growth in wildland areas can result in less frequent, more intense fires.

“Wildfires are absolutely a natural part of our ecosystem, but with populations growing, with infrastructure, in many cases, being able to allow fire to naturally burn is much more difficult in today’s world,” Berlant told the Sun.

He added that about 95 percent of the wildfires CalFire responds to aren’t natural in the first place—they’re sparked by human activity. However, Berlant said climate change, not population growth, is the biggest perpetrator of worsening fire conditions. 

In Southern California, we’re entering year 16 of lower-than-normal precipitation, leaving the land drier and particularly fire prone. John Dumas, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Oxnard, told the Sun that critical fire season has inched up in the calendar year over the past decade.

“What we normally see here is by around October, we’re just dead dry. Everything that might have had water from wherever has gone away and we approach what’s called a critical level,” Dumas said. “But we’ve been seeing the October numbers earlier and earlier in the year. Even as early as July.”

Patzert claimed the “fire season” doesn’t even exist anymore.

“The fire season has essentially become an oxymoron,” he said. “Because it’s all year-round now. But as we get into the hotter, warmer months of summer, of course it gets worse.”

And this summer could get especially bad, he said.

“We have millions of dead trees, not only in the national forest but also in the urban landscape, because this has been building for many, many years,” Patzert said. “After a quite disappointing rain season last year, and essentially no rain and snow the year before, the situation is exceptionally volatile. So that’s the bottom line. We’re screwed.”

Speaking of rain—remember that El Niño we were supposed to get this past winter? Well, it didn’t really happen, meaning it didn’t dump enough rain on us to moisten the land and reduce fire hazard.

In fact, according to some climatologists, it gave us just enough rain to actually exacerbate the potential for fires this summer—it rained enough to grow out grass and ground vegetation, but then stopped, after which those plants dried out and the land ended up with even more fire fuel than before.

Dumas said this theory is anecdotal and unsupported by numbers, but Patzert agreed with it. He said the “rainy” season grew out local chaparral.

“In the San Gabriels and the Santa Ynez Mountains, it’s a chaparral forest, and chaparral is very oily and it burns very hot, very volatile,” he said. “And we had just enough rain for grasses to grow and dry out.”

Patzert’s proposed solution: Stop letting forests age. Firefighters are starting to adopt this philosophy as well—Berlant said CalFire, the U.S. Forest Service, and other fire managers are using prescribed burns and brush clearings to help simulate natural fires and keep wildlands healthy.

“I’m opposed to old forests,” Patzert said. “The older the forest, the bigger the danger, Every 20 or 30 years, these areas should burn down. Back in the good old days, when Mother Nature ruled the world instead of CalFire, that’s what would happen.” 

Staff Writer Brenna Swanston can be reached at [email protected].

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