Wildfires may be worse this year
As blame for California’s wildfires rises over Sacramento like smoke from last year’s blazes, the state is being forced to confront the possibility that it will happen again in 2018.
California’s drought is worsening, and blazes have charred more acres in the first six months of this year than they did in the same period in 2017, a year that ultimately set records for deaths and destruction. The state is covered with driedout brush and the skeletal branches of 129 million trees killed by a bark-beetle infestation. Hundreds of miles of electric transmission lines run through the dead forests and crisscross hills crowned with golden, dried grass.
More than 85 percent of the California’s natural landscape is abnormally dry, according to data through July 10 from the U.S. Drought Monitor in Lincoln, Nebraska. Drought now covers over 44 percent of the state. That’s not good news for Californians still recovering from one of the worstever years for wildfires.
“It’s mirroring last year,” Scott McLean, deputy chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said in a telephone interview. “Grass and brush are just tinder, they are like a fuse for these wildfires.”
Last year’s fires consumed wine grapes, hurt avocados and some of the state’s extensive citrus groves. If flames were to erupt across California’s Central Valley, a variety of crops would be endangered. California farms and ranches produced more than $47 billion in agricultural products in 2015, according to the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture.
The blazes put California’s electric utilities in the crosshairs, with PG&E Corp. and Southern California Edison facing massive liabilities if their equipment ignited the wildfires. State investigators have so far linked PG&E equipment to 16 of a swarm of fires that swept through Northern California wine country in October, causing $10 billion in insured losses. Forty-four deaths occurred in the wine country fires.
The utilities are taking steps to prevent another disaster. After last year, regulators ordered them to clear branches and trees farther away from overhead power lines. State lawmakers are also considering a package of bills that would improve disaster planning, add emergency-response resources and require utility safety plans.
PG&E and Edison say they have developed procedures to cut power in areas where extreme fire conditions are occurring, a practice that has been used by Sempra Energy’s San Diego Gas & Electric. PG&E and Edison said they are taking other measures to reduce fire risk such as expanding their network of weather monitoring stations, increasing patrols of power lines and hardening their power poles and lines.
“We are looking at fire season as a year-round event now,” said Phil Herrington, senior vice president of transmission and distribution at Southern California Edison. “The new normal is how we refer to it.”
San Diego Gas & Electric said its “aircrane helitanker” — which can drop almost 3,000 gallons (10,000 liters) of water — has responded to more fires and dropped more water so far this year than it did in all of 2017.