Calif. fires growing bigger, burn in the same places
REDDING, Calif. – From the fire on the Klamath National Forest in the north to the fire near Bakersfield to the south, California blazes are ripping through dozens of fire scars.
The largest active fire in the nation has churned through more than half a million acres of forestland in California. Much of that terrain already burned during one of at least 10 major fires over the past 20 years, according to a University of California, San Diego data project called Wifire.
Those blazes have scarred the landscape so severely it may not recover for decades, fire experts say. And data shows that over the past 10 years, fires throughout the state are becoming larger.
Where fires burn hottest, they tend to kill the large trees and convert the landscape from forest to chaparral brushland, said Lenya N. Quinn-Davidson, area fire adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension.
“Once you get into that dynamic, it’s hard to break it because now you’ve set those areas up. And we know from research that areas that burn at high severity, burn again at high severity, and then they burn again at high severity,” Quinn-Davidson said.
“It’s really hard to reverse that at the landscape scale,” she said.
But not everything is doom and gloom, she said. Low-to-moderate-intensity fires also are an antidote to a problem that aggressive fire suppression during the past 100 years helped create.
Last year’s August Complex fires torched more than 1 million acres, but most of that burned at low to moderate severity, helping to thin the forest in areas that had become too thick with trees and brush, Quinn-Davidson said.
Fire managers often intentionally set fires called controlled burns, starting in the fall and lasting through the spring. The low-intensity fires are supposed to kill off the understory in the forest and prevent it from growing too thick.
State and federal officials in California hope to reduce fire danger in the state by burning 1 million acres a year through controlled burns – also called prescribed fire – by 2025.
So far, though, government officials are nowhere near the goal set for 2025.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection expects about 50,000 acres will be treated by controlled burns and mechanical thinning on non-federal land in the state for the 2020-2021 fiscal year, according to Christine McMorrow, a Cal Fire spokeswoman.
The U.S. Forest Service in 2020 thinned about 212,690 acres of forest in California, using controlled burns and mechanical thinning, according to Jonathan Groveman, a Forest Service spokesman.
Scientists who study fire say that regular, low-intensity fire was once a natural part of the landscape that kept the forest from becoming overgrown.
But over the past 100 years, the firefighting policy in California has been to extinguish fires as quickly as possible.
That has left too many hillsides today covered with brush and trees that grow too close together, and those areas sometimes burn at high intensity, Quinn-Davidson said.