Firefighters have made significant progress battling the ferocious Oak fire burning in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Yosemite national park, achieving 45% containment by Friday morning. The blaze has consumed more than 19,200 acres, fueled through the dry, overgrown vegetation coating the hillsides and favorable fire conditions that spurred erratic and extreme behavior.
Many have still been kept from their homes as the fire continues to spread since igniting last week, as residents await word on whether theirs was one of the 162 structures reported destroyed. That number could go up as damage assessment crews work to investigate the destruction, and hundreds of houses still lie in the fire’s path.
“If the fire intensifies it could reach those areas,” said a Cal Fire public information officer, Hector Vasquez, noting that warmer and drier conditions are expected in the coming days and that the steep, rocky terrain where the fire is burning has hindered efforts to corral it. Homes will remain at risk until the blaze has been completely extinguished. “But the number [of homes at risk] has gone down significantly in the last few days,” he added.
The Oak fire is one of many disasters raging across the US, as scorching temperatures baked the Pacific north-west, the west remained parched in record drought, and severe storms sent flash floods surging across several states. At least four people have died due to the extreme heat in Oregon, according to the state medical examiner, while the death toll mounts in Kentucky, where 16 people have been reported killed in historic flooding.
“We may have even lost entire families,” said Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, speaking in an update posted on YouTube.
The climate crisis has turned up the dial on disasters and, as temperatures continue to climb, extreme events are expected to increase and overlap, testing resilience and hampering recovery. Although the ways that individual events are linked to climate change must be studied to be confirmed, the trends tell a troubling story of what’s to come.
“Instead of random extreme weather events, we’re seeing these large-scale anomalies,” said climate scientist Karen McKinnon, who studies climate variability at the University of California, Los Angeles. She also noted the scale of the continent-wide heatwave.
“Most evidence pointed to the extreme 120F temperatures in the Pacific north-west last year as being largely a freak event,” she said. “But if we see it again, that’s a huge signal that something about the underlying physics of the system is changing. If you see two freak events in a row, then you know you need to re-examine your conceptual system.”
As for fires, California – which experienced record-breaking blazes in recent years – has had a milder start to its high-risk season, even with the destructive Oak fire.
“This time last year we had multiple fires burning throughout the state,” Vasquez said, adding that the lack of competition for resources played a big part in enabling crews to attack the fire quickly. “We had so many personnel and they got here quickly because we had a wide range of personnel not assigned to other incidents.”
Still, with months left before the state sees wetting rains that reduce the risks, this could just be the beginning of another fire-filled season. Fires are important to maintaining the health of California’s landscapes, and can improve resilience and ecosystem recovery, especially in forests that are adapted to flames. But high-intensity conditions and an over-abundance of dried fuel have changed fire behavior, resulting in more destructive blazes.
Overgrown parched vegetation across the state is baking in summer heat. Many regions are primed to burn.
“There have been several fires started since the Oak incident started,” Vasquez said, “and that could be a strong indicator of what lies ahead of us.”
