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| On alert: In Orange County's Foothill Ranch, residents watched and waited for evacuation orders Monday, as did many Californians. Daniel A. Anderson/Orange County Register/AP  Amid the wildfires, a helping hand |
California's age of megafires
Drought, housing expansion, and oversupply of tinder make for bigger, hotter fires.
By Daniel B. Wood | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the October 24, 2007 edition
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Los Angeles - There's a reason fire squads now battling more than a dozen blazes in southern California are having such difficulty containing the flames, despite better preparedness than ever and decades of experience fighting fires fanned by the notorious Santa Ana winds. The wildfires themselves, experts say, generally are hotter, move faster, and spread more erratically than in the past.
The short-term explanation is that the region, which usually has dry summers, has had nine inches less rain than normal this year.
Longer term, climate change across the West is leading to hotter days on average and longer fire seasons. Experts say this is likely to yield more megafires like the conflagrations that this week forced evacuations of at least 300,000 resident in California's southland and led President Bush to declare a disaster emergency in seven counties on Tuesday.
Megafires, also called "siege fires," are the increasingly frequent blazes that burn 500,000 acres or more – 10 times the size of the average forest fire of 20 years ago. One of the current wildfires is the sixth biggest in California ever, in terms of acreage burned, according to state figures and news reports.
The trend to more superhot fires, experts say, has been driven by a century-long policy of the US Forest Service to stop wildfires as quickly as possible. The unintentional consequence was to halt the natural eradication of underbrush, now the primary fuel for megafires.
Three other factors contribute to the trend, they add. First is climate change marked by a 1-degree F. rise in average yearly temperature across the West. Second is a fire season that on average is 78 days longer than in the late 1980s. Third is increased building of homes and other structures in wooded areas.
"We are increasingly building our homes ... in fire-prone ecosystems," says Dominik Kulakowski, adjunct professor of biology at Clark University Graduate School of Geography in Worcester, Mass. Doing that "in many of the forests of the Western US ... is like building homes on the side of an active volcano."
In California, where population growth has averaged more than 600,000 a year for at least a decade, housing has pushed into such areas.
"What once was open space is now residential homes providing fuel to make fires burn with greater intensity," says Terry McHale of the California Department of Forestry firefighters union. "With so much dryness, so many communities to catch fire, so many fronts to fight, it becomes an almost incredible job."
That said, many experts give California high marks for making progress on preparedness since 2003, when the largest fires in state history scorched 750,000 acres, burned 3,640 homes, and killed 22 people. Stung then by criticism of bungling that allowed fires to spread when they might have been contained, personnel are meeting the peculiar challenges of neighborhood- and canyon-hopping fires better than in recent years, observers say.
