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It is the most destructive blaze so far this fire season, destroying more than three times in area than the nearby Washburn Fire, which has been nearly 90 percent contained. The Oak Fire has engulfed 6,795 hectares (16,791 acres) and is 10 percent contained, Cal Fire said on Monday. So if there’s a silver lining, it’s that we’re throwing everything at this fire right now,” Joseph Amador, a Cal Fire spokesperson, told Al Jazeera. “We have concentrated all our crews throughout the state here. The absence of other major fires in the region enabled Cal Fire to concentrate 2,500 firefighters on the blaze, and the lack of wind allowed for the continuous use of aircraft to drop water and fire retardant, officials said. Several officials with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) said the fire initially behaved unlike any other they had seen, with burning embers sparking smaller fires up to 3km (2 miles) in front of the main conflagration.īut firefighters have not seen more of that so-called spotting, Cal Fire spokesperson Natasha Fouts said on Monday from the incident command centre in Merced, about 210km (130 miles) inland from San Francisco. The massive blaze expanded rapidly since it began on Friday, overwhelming the initial deployment of firefighters as scorching and dry weather fuelled its galloping pace through dry forest and underbrush. “Which means that the current fires are probably harder to fight than they would have been in a cooler world.Firefighters have begun to slow the spread of the largest wildfire so far this year in California, after the Oak Fire threatened the famed Yosemite National Park and forced thousands of residents to evacuate their communities. “These same fires today are occurring in a world roughly three degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it would have been without warming,” says Williams. The total acreage burned fluctuates considerably from year to year, depending on many factors, including luck: Rain dampens things down early, or fires start in places where they are easier to contain.īut climate change is driving a clear trend: When wildfires happen in California, they have a better chance of growing large and destructive. The total number of wildfires in California hasn’t increased in fact the numbers were a lot higher in the 1980s and 1990s than in the past decade.

“That's essentially what’s enabled these recent fires to be so destructive, at times of the year when you wouldn't really expect them.” “We've been lengthening fire season by shortening the precipitation season, and we're warming throughout,” says Swain. That's what happened this year, as well as in last year's Thomas fire. So if a fire gets sparked, it can spread fast and hard. In the fall, California is often buffeted by whipping winds. That may seem like a minor issue, but it has big effects. But in the past few years, those rains haven't come until much later in the autumn-November, or even December. “Usually-or, I don't want to even say usually anymore because things are changing so fast-we get some rains around Halloween that wet things down,” says Faith Kearns, a scientist at University of California Institute for Water Resources in Oakland.

Each extra day lets plants dry out more, increasing their susceptibility to burning. California's summer dry season has also been lengthening. Since the 1980’s, he and a colleague reported in 2016, climate change contributed to an extra 10 million acres of burning in western forests- an area about the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.Ĭhanges in precipitation are another factor. Because of this effect of climate change, wildfires are increasing in size, both in California and across the western U.S., says Park Williams, a fire expert at Columbia University.