American West Bracing For Unprecedented Wildfire Season: "Nothing Looks Good"
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Severe drought has turned forests and grasslands into dry fuels, ready to ignite from a careless camper or a lightning strike. More people are building in areas bordering wildlands, expanding the so-called wildland-urban interface, an area where wildfires impact people the most. Invasive, highly flammable vegetation is spreading uncontrolled across the West.
“I’m seeing probably the worst combination of conditions in my lifetime,” said Derrick DeGroot, a county commissioner in southern Oregon’s Klamath County. “We have an enormous fuel load in the forests, and we are looking at a drought unlike we’ve seen probably in the last 115 years.” Asked how worried he is about the 2021 fire season, DeGroot said: “On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m a 12. Nothing looks good.”
In other prevention measures in the West, utility companies are removing vegetation around power lines and are ready to impose blackouts when those lines threaten to spark a fire. Armies of firefighters are being beefed up. And communities are offering incentives for residents to make their own properties fire-resistant.
Still, much work remains to change the region’s trajectory with fire, particularly in two key areas, said Scott Stephens, professor of wildland fire science at the University of California, Berkeley. “One is getting people better prepared for the inevitability of fire in areas like the wildland-urban interface. That includes new construction,” he said. “And the second is getting our ecosystems better prepared for climate change and fire impacts.” On the local level, individuals and communities need to create defensible spaces and evacuation plans, he said. On the government level, more resources need to go toward managing forests. “I think we’ve got one to two decades,” Stephens said. “If we don’t do this in earnest, we’re frankly just going to be watching the forest change right in front of our eyes from fire, climate change, drought, insects, things of that nature.”
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https://ktla.com/news/california/nothing-looks-good-california-and-other-western-states-prepare-for-a-tense-wildfire-season/