A wildfire that quickly consumed more than 14,000 acres of grassland and brush in a mountainous area northwest of Los Angeles over the weekend marked the start of what experts warn could be a prolonged and dangerous fire season in the West. .
“This is a taste of what’s to come,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The fire, called the Post Fire, started Saturday afternoon near Interstate 5, about 45 miles from Los Angeles, authorities said. It forced the evacuation of about 1,200 people from the Hungry Valley Campground, a popular state off-road vehicle recreation area. Authorities also closed nearby Pyramid Lake, a destination for weekend boaters.
As of Sunday afternoon, the fire was about 2 percent contained and ranked as the state’s largest wildfire so far this year, according to CalFire, California’s firefighting agency.
The Post Fire burned about 10,000 acres within 12 hours of starting, a rapid spread fueled by hot, dry and windy conditions, said Kenichi Haskett, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Winds blowing up to 50 miles per hour over the hilltops made firefighting efforts especially difficult. When firefighters drop water from airplanes, for example, “it just sprays everywhere,” Haskett said.
While high winds were expected to continue through Sunday and Monday, Haskett said firefighters hoped to make significant progress in containing the fire in the coming days.
“Our goal is to hopefully get it done within a week,” he said.
Two buildings, a camping kiosk and another recreational building, were damaged, Haskett said, but no homes have burned so far.
Still, he said, officials were encouraging residents of the area surrounding Castaic Lake, another popular weekend destination, to prepare to leave if winds continued to push the fire further south.
On Sunday afternoon, another fast-moving wildfire, the Max Fire, ignited about 50 miles east of the Post Fire and burned several hundred acres near homes in Lancaster, a city of about 170,000 people. Authorities told some residents to evacuate, although on Sunday night the Los Angeles County Fire Department said in X that “progress has stopped.”
The Post fire alone seems unlikely to break records or cause widespread damage, Dr. Swain said. But the speed of its spread and the fact that it’s still mid-June illustrate why, even after two wet winters, Californians should be on high alert as summer progresses, he added.
Climate change is causing wider swings between precipitation extremes. In California, the whiplash between drought and flood has been particularly intense in recent years.
“There’s this cycle between wetter and drier conditions,” Dr. Swain said. “We’re used to that.”
However, global warming trends are exacerbating the effects of these changes, he said.
Late 2022 and into 2023 saw an unprecedented rainy season after years of catastrophic drought. It rained so much that late into the summer and fall, when fire risk is typically highest, vegetation that would otherwise be prone to burning was still green and wet.
Last winter in California was also rainy, which stimulated the growth of even more vegetation.
But Dr. Swain said the late spring has been warm in the West (temperatures in Las Vegas broke records this month) and the stifling air is expected to continue.
That heat absorbs moisture from the grass and weeds that have grown over the past two years, turning them into a thick carpet of tinder. The hotter and drier the climate, the more quickly vegetation becomes fuel for fires.
“While dryness levels are not record-breaking at the moment, what is anomalous is the amount of fuel there is,” Dr Swain said.
He said grasslands tend to burn first, because grasses dry out more quickly. But if hot, dry conditions persist and combine with fearsome fall winds, such as the famous Santa Ana winds in Southern California, residents could see an active fire season that lasts well into the fall.
Of course, residents of the West are still subject to some chance: Lightning and human accidents helped push California’s 2020 wildfire season from bad to catastrophic.
State and federal officials have stepped up efforts to prevent wildfires, particularly with the use of prescribed burning, a practice of intentionally starting fires (when conditions make them easy to contain) to reduce the amount of fuel on the ground.
But Dr. Swain emphasized that regardless of prevention efforts, climate change is making everything more unpredictable and dangerous.
“The more adverse the conditions, the more likely you are to have bad luck,” he said.
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