Assessment teams were moving through mountain towns to check for additional damage, Fouts said. Gavin Newsom proclaimed a state of emergency for Mariposa County due to the fire's effects.įlames destroyed at least 10 residential and commercial structures and damaged five others, Cal Fire said. "It just seemed like it was above our house and coming our way really quickly," Reynolds-Brown told KCRA-TV. They fled as ash rained down and the fire descended a hill towards their property. Lynda Reynolds-Brown and her husband Aubrey awaited news about the fate of their home from an evacuation center at an elementary school. “We urge people to evacuate when told,” she said. The cause was under investigation.Įvacuations were in place for over 6,000 people living across a several-mile span of the sparsely populated area in the Sierra Nevada foothills, though a handful of residents defied the orders and stayed behind, said Adrienne Freeman with the U.S. Officials described “explosive fire behavior” on Saturday as flames made runs through bone-dry vegetation caused by the worst drought in decades.īy Sunday the blaze had consumed more than 22 square miles (56 square km) of forest land, with no containment, Cal Fire said. The fire erupted Friday southwest of the park near the town of Midpines in Mariposa County. Light winds blew embers ahead into tree branches “and because it's so dry, it's easy for the spot fires to get established and that's what fuels the growth,” Fouts said. “Which means that the current fires are probably harder to fight than they would have been in a cooler world.Crews on the ground protected homes as air tankers dropped retardant on 50-foot (15-meter) flames racing along ridgetops east of the tiny community of Jerseydale. “These same fires today are occurring in a world roughly three degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it would have been without warming,” says Williams. The total acreage burned fluctuates considerably from year to year, depending on many factors, including luck: Rain dampens things down early, or fires start in places where they are easier to contain.īut climate change is driving a clear trend: When wildfires happen in California, they have a better chance of growing large and destructive. The total number of wildfires in California hasn’t increased in fact the numbers were a lot higher in the 1980s and 1990s than in the past decade. “That's essentially what’s enabled these recent fires to be so destructive, at times of the year when you wouldn't really expect them.”
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“We've been lengthening fire season by shortening the precipitation season, and we're warming throughout,” says Swain. That's what happened this year, as well as in last year's Thomas fire. So if a fire gets sparked, it can spread fast and hard. In the fall, California is often buffeted by whipping winds. That may seem like a minor issue, but it has big effects. But in the past few years, those rains haven't come until much later in the autumn-November, or even December. “Usually-or, I don't want to even say usually anymore because things are changing so fast-we get some rains around Halloween that wet things down,” says Faith Kearns, a scientist at University of California Institute for Water Resources in Oakland.
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Each extra day lets plants dry out more, increasing their susceptibility to burning. California's summer dry season has also been lengthening. Since the 1980’s, he and a colleague reported in 2016, climate change contributed to an extra 10 million acres of burning in western forests- an area about the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.Ĭhanges in precipitation are another factor.
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Because of this effect of climate change, wildfires are increasing in size, both in California and across the western U.S., says Park Williams, a fire expert at Columbia University.