Last year, California experienced its worst wildfire season on record, with over 4 million acres burned, however, with worsening drought conditions and a water crisis on the Oregon-California border, 2021 is shaping up to be another potentially deadly year.
California Governor Gavin Newsome unveiled a revised budget proposal on Friday that includes what his office said is record spending for emergency preparation efforts for this year’s fire season, according to NBC News.
Newsome wants to “make the single largest investment in wildfire preparedness in our state’s history — $2 billion in emergency preparedness investments,” his office said in a statement after announcing his proposal for the 2021-22 fiscal year that begins July 1.
As Mother Jones points out, the state’s climate and lack of any rainfall does make California especially prone to wildfires, but we can’t blame all of this on Mother Nature.
As Jeffrey Ball wrote for Mother Jones in 2019: “Today’s monster fires result largely from three human forces: taxpayer-funded fire suppression that has made the forest a tinderbox; policies that encourage construction in places that are clearly prone to burning; and climate change, which has worsened everything.
The Palisades Fire in Topanga State Park
A small brush fire, covering about 15 acres started in Topanga State Park in the Santa Monica mountains on Friday, and grew over the weekend to consume over 1,325 acres by Sunday evening. And it was given its official name – the Palisades Fire.
The blaze was so large that a mandatory evacuation was ordered for over 1,000 people in 500 homes, many of which were multimillion-dollar complexes. And while the Palisades Fire is relatively small, compared to fires that typically burn hundreds of thousands of acres, this fire and a number of other blazes that have started this month give credence to studies that show the fire season is starting earlier than is usual.
And this last point is especially crucial as scientists have searched for ways to explain why the area covered by California’s summer wildfires are eight times larger than they were in 1972.
“This climate-change connection is straightforward,” Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, told the New York Times last year. “Warmer temperatures dry out fuels. In areas with abundant and very dry fuels, all you need is a spark.”
As Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist, explained to CNN last week: “A combination of factors—including short-term severe to extreme drought and long-term climate change—are in alignment for yet another year of exceptionally high risk across much of California’s potentially flammable landscapes.”
