It’s nearly August, but one familiar summer trend has been very scarce this year: wildfires.
California is off to its slowest start to fire season in 25 years.
A state traumatized by huge fires over the past decade that have burned millions of acres — killing more than 200 people, and generating choking smoke and apocalyptic orange skies — has seen almost no major fire activity so far in 2023.
As of Thursday, just 24,229 acres had burned in California since Jan. 1, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. That’s 82% less than the state’s 10-year average and is the lowest of any year since 1998.
Only four structures have burned statewide in wildfires so far this year and there have been no fatalities, reports Cal Fire, the state’s main firefighting agency. By comparison, one fire in July 2018, the Carr Fire near Redding, destroyed 1,614 structures and killed eight people, including three firefighters.
The reason for the state’s good fortune now, experts say, is water. Lots of it.
“I was in the mountains this past week,” said Scott Stephens, a professor of wildland fire science at UC Berkeley. “Things are green. Streams are flowing. It’s still wet.”
While fire agencies often warn that extra rain can help fuel fire danger, an analysis of 30 years of rainfall and wildfire records by the Bay Area News Group shows that wildfire risk in California is much higher after dry winters, and lower after wet winters like this year’s.
Since 1993, four of the five worst fire years measured by acres burned statewide occurred after drier-than-normal winters. Those were 2020, 2021, 2018 and 2008. The only one that followed a wet winter was in 2017, when fall rains came late in the season and power lines fell in winds, sparking the Wine Country fires in October, and the massive Thomas Fire in December in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.
In contrast, all five of California’s mildest fire years over the past three decades happened…
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