On the ground

One element of the new normal can be seen, and felt, at your feet.

“Sad to say, we're getting kind of used to this,” said Brian Fennessy, chief of the Orange County Fire Authority, at the start of a Wednesday news conference at a Laguna Niguel park about a half-mile from the neighborhood ravaged by the Coastal fire.

Fennessy was talking about the new frequency of fires in nontraditional fire months. He referenced the Emerald fire, a 150-acre brush fire north of Laguna Beach that took place in February, as another example of a blaze that happened in what once was the opposite of fire season.

What was unusual about the Coastal fire, he said, was the severity of the conditions on the ground.

When crews arrived in Laguna Niguel last week, they encountered routine winds and slightly coolerthan-average temperatures — and land conditions that defied the calendar. MidMay

vegetation looked like, and burned like, mid-August vegetation. And those hyper-arid conditions helped the fire move at a sprint, turning a relatively small event (200 acres) into the most damaging neighborhood conflagration to hit the county in five years, with 20houses destroyed and 11 others damaged.

“What we saw today is not something we're used to seeing at this time of year,” Fennessy said.

Firewise, the no-longerunusual is happening in Southern California and beyond.

On May 1, there were 11 major fires burning and uncontained in Arizona, Colorado, Florida and New Mexico, according to the monthly report from the National Interagency Fire Center. That's a full three months before traditional fire season used to kick in, and it's believed to be a record number of fires so early in the year.

The federal report said 1.1 million acres had burned in the western U.S. so far this year, a figure that is some 70% higher than what has been “average” over the past decade. The previous decade, it should be noted, was the most fire-prone in national history.

The report also noted that recent weather patterns (little but not zero rainfall; temperatures within 5 degrees of normal) have created springtime fire conditions in Southern California that, a generation ago, would have seemed appropriate in mid-July.

“The drought continues to worsen across the area, with extreme drought in the San Joaquin Valley expanding into the Sierra and the interior portions of the central coast. Otherwise, severe drought continues across most of the area, except for moderate drought south of Los Angeles County from the mountains westward.”

But the agency, like many other weather and fire trackers, now assesses fire risk in context with the recent past, when fire seasons have been transformed by climate change. That's why, after taking into account factors as diverse as ocean surface temperature off the coast of Alaska (cooler than normal) to marine layer on the Southern California coast (thinner than normal) to the persistent drought (way, way drier than normal), the agency concluded that Southern California's fire risk, for the next few months at least, might not be as bad as in the very recent past:

“Near to below normal large fire activity is expected from May through August due to well below normal fine fuel loading.”