Drought, dead trees add up to big fire danger for California
Stubborn drought conditions and an epidemic of dead and dying trees mean California is facing a potentially catastrophic fire season, federal officials said Tuesday as they promised to send extra money and personnel to the state.
Similar circumstances contributed to record acreage lost to wildfires in the West last year, including three blazes that laid waste to Lake County, and top officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture said improved rain and snow totals during the winter did little to ease the threat.
Four straight dry winters before this one wiped out sugar pines, cedars and oaks throughout the Sierra and other mountains in California, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said during a briefing on the fire season in Washington, D.C.
The latest report from the National Interagency Fire Center, a collective of firefighting agencies, shows high fire potential for Southern California, the southern and central Sierra, and the foothills of the Sacramento Valley through the forecasting period of July and August.
[...] the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention, which manages the state’s firefighting crews, has ramped up staffing earlier in the season for the second year in a row.
The result is browning leaves and dying limbs, which weaken a tree and make it more susceptible to bark beetle infestation.
At least two to three years of average rainfall are needed to bring tree moisture levels back to normal, scientists estimate.
La Niña, which is the opposite climate pattern of El Niño and represents a cooling of the Pacific tropics, is sometimes associated with dry weather in California — though that trend is far from clear.
“What we saw this spring is that snowpack has come down faster than we’ve seen,” he said, noting that above-normal temperatures are quickly drying up the vegetation and that Southern California wildlands never saw much dampening in the first place.
In October, the Valley Fire tore across 76,000 acres in Lake, Napa and Sonoma counties, killing four people and destroying more than 1,300 homes.
Federal officials say wildfire danger nationwide has increased with climate change.