California’s Fire Luck Just Ran Out, by Caroline Mimbs Nyce

2 comments

1. Caroline Mimbs Nyce: “For two years, the fire gods cut California a break. The winter rains came down heavy, and brought the state’s yearslong drought to an end. Plants started growing again. Grasses were green. The poppies bloomed larger than normal. For awhile, living here meant seeing the place’s better nature—going outside and exploring the mountains and lakes and vineyards, without thinking of breathing in toxic smoke plumes. The apocalyptic scenes of 2020 and 2021 receded like a bad dream; any worries about fire were a problem of the past, or the future. [~https://theatln.tc/X6JeZtyz~](https://theatln.tc/X6JeZtyz) 

   “Then the heat came, and the green faded. Plants died. People who know where to look started to see the warning signs. Now when David Acuna, a battalion chief at Cal Fire, walks around his local area, he sees layers of grass: standing grass, but also the remnants of previous years’ grasses. ‘They are just waiting to burn,’ he told me yesterday. Wildfire is cyclical, and wet years can set up future ones for worse fires. Even when the landscape is lush and healthy, California is operating on borrowed time.

   “This week, fire came roaring back. California’s first major fire in three years is burning. The Park Fire, located near the city of Chico in Northern California, started Wednesday and grew quickly, tripling in size in a single day. By this morning, the blaze, which started when a man allegedly rolled a burning car into a gully, had spread across more than 300,000 acres, and was zero percent contained. Already it is one of the 10 largest recorded fires in California history, and it is moving extremely fast. ‘We had our fire grow by 120,000 acres in a single day,’ Acuna said. ‘That is not normal.’”

   Read more: [~https://theatln.tc/X6JeZtyz~](https://theatln.tc/X6JeZtyz) 

2. They never had wildfire luck to begin with. The correct concept here is, it went from bad to worse.