Fires in the West are growing bigger and more destructive. Why and what can be done?

Experts say the combination of decades of efforts to extinguish fires at the first sign of smoke and climate change have laid the groundwork for a massive wildfire in Northern California and dozens of smaller fires across the western U.S. and Canada.

These fires are moving faster and are harder to fight than those of the past. The only way to prevent future wildfires from becoming so intense is to use smaller, controlled fires, as indigenous peoples have done for centuries, experts said. But these experts acknowledged that change won’t be easy.

Here are some things you should know about the latest fires and why they are so intense:

FIRES SCARE HUNDREDS OF SQUARE MILES

The Park Fire, California’s largest so far this year, was 544 square miles (1,409 square kilometers) in size on Saturday. The blaze started Wednesday when authorities said a man pushed a burning car into a ravine in Chico and then calmly mingled with others fleeing the scene.

The fire’s intensity and dramatic spread led firefighters to draw uneasy comparisons to the massive Camp Fire, which raged out of control in nearby Paradise in 2018, killing 85 people and destroying 11,000 homes.

Communities elsewhere in the western U.S. and Canada were also besieged by fast-moving flames Saturday. More than 110 active fires were burning across the U.S. on Friday, covering 2,800 square miles (7,250 square kilometers), according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

FIRES ARE GETTING BIGGER AND MORE threatening

“Whipped up” is how Jennifer Marlon, a researcher at Yale’s School of the Environment, described the recent fires.

Marlon said there aren’t necessarily more wildfires now, but they are bigger and more severe because of the warming atmosphere. “The big message is that seeing extreme wildfires is just one part of a series of unnatural disasters that we’re going to continue to see because of climate change,” she said.

Ten of California’s 20 largest fires occurred in the past five years, said Benjamin Hatchett, a fire meteorologist with the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

And he noted that the Park Fire was the eighth-largest fire on Saturday morning, even as it continued to spread. He blamed climate change for creating more variability in weather conditions.

“We have a lot of very, very wet years and very, very dry years,” Hatchett said. “And so we get a lot of this variability that helps fuels accumulate and then dry out.”

That’s the case this year in California, where record temperatures have dried out vegetation that had developed in recent wetter-than-average years, Hatchett said.

“So now we’re really well-positioned to have these widespread large wildfires,” Hatchett said. “And we’re starting to push the boundaries of the availability of firefighting resources.”

According to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, these fires don’t even give firefighters a chance to rest at night.

“They’re burning with extreme intensity all night long and just continuing into the next day,” he said. “We’re also seeing fires lasting longer than we’re used to.”

FORESTS CAN HAVE DIFFICULTY WITH RECOVERY

The fires now raging are sometimes so intense and hot that they are turning forests into a different kind of ecosystem, Swain said.

“The forest is not coming back in the same way as in many other regions,” Swain said.

Part of the problem is that climate change means warmer conditions as plant life returns, in some cases replacing trees with invasive grasses that are themselves flammable.

“Climate change has changed the context in which these fires occur,” he said. “And that not only affects the intensity and severity of the fires themselves, which is clearly the case at the moment, but it also affects the ability of ecosystems to recover afterward.”

THE BLUSHING OF FIRES IN THE PAST IS LEADING TO PROBLEMS NOW

In parts of the country, such as the Midwest, farmers use fire to control trees, woody shrubs and invasive species. But that’s not the case in the western U.S., where fires have been extinguished in their early stages for decades.

“The problem now is that we’ve allowed so much fuel to build up in some of these places that the fires are very hot and intense. And that tends to cause more damage than what nature normally does with a fire,” said Tim Brown, a research professor at the Desert Research Institute and director of the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, Nevada.

Fires were once common in the West due to lightning strikes and indigenous burning, Hatchett said. The practice stopped during colonial settlement, but now needs to return, Hatchett said.

“That’s the only way we’re really going to get out of this is by accepting and embracing the use of fire on our terms,” ​​Hatchett said. “Otherwise, we’re going to have fire on fire’s terms, which is what we’re seeing now.”

That’s not easy, because there are no longer large, open landscapes where millions of hectares can burn uncontrolled, Swain acknowledged.

“And that’s kind of a conundrum: This is something we need to do more often. But the practical reality of this is not at all simple,” Swain said.

But he said there is no other solution to addressing the risk of wildfires than one that involves fire.

“We’re going to see more and more fire on the ground,” he said. “The question is whether we want to see it in the form of more manageable, primarily beneficial prescribed fires, or in these primarily damaging, huge, intense fires that we’re seeing more and more of.”