Over the past few decades, wildfires have become an increasingly pressing concern for California and its inhabitants. As the droughts have grown more prolonged and frequent, and the dry season has only become even drier, these wildfires have begun to happen far more consistently and cover a much wider stretch of land. Things have worsened this year for the Golden State, as these wildfires have already burned more in 2024 than in 2023.
And not just incrementally more land than the previous year, vastly more land. So far, in this year’s California’s wildfire season, about 20 times more acres of land have burned than last year. Since the beginning of the year, there have been more than 3,500 wildfires across the state through early July, causing about 207,000 acres of land to burn. Around this time last year, about 10,000 acres had burned. Cal Fire said last week that the five-year average of acres burned through mid-July is about 39,000.
“We are not just in a fire season, but in a fire year,” Joe Tyler, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), said at a news conference in July. Tyler said Cal Fire and its partners are “fully staffed” with fire trucks, bulldozers, and newly introduced Blackhawk helicopters that can fly at night, all in efforts to put out and hopefully prevent further spreading of the fires.
California’s wildfire season is already proving to be much more of a challenge than even the most dire prognostications for 2024 had indicated. Thousands of residents are evacuating out of necessity as Northern California wildfires spread. More hot weather is expected throughout the rest of the year, meaning that by 2025, the total amount of damage done this year could be utterly devastating.
As part of its 2024 budget, California will allocate $2.6 billion through 2028 to fighting wildfires and improving forest health, in addition to $200 million annually to help prevent fires. To help with staffing, workweeks will be shortened for state firefighters, and the state has set a goal to hire about 2,400 more firefighters in the next five years. This is part of a long-term plan to alleviate these pressures and combat these wildfires and the factors leading to their ignition and rapid spreading.
Tyler said humans cause over 95% of wildfires. He warned California residents to be cautious when engaging in activities that can cause sparks, such as mowing lawns, towing vehicles, welding, and shooting guns. In hot, dry, and windy conditions, as has been the case in California far more often than not in recent years, sparks can ignite into flames quite easily. Gov. Gavin Newsom cited record-high temperatures and lightning strikes as the source of some fires.
“Climate change is real … If you don’t believe in science, you have to believe your own eyes, the lived experience all of us have out here in the western United States, for that matter, all around the globe.”
