On the first Sunday in January, Tom Hein stood on the tarmac in Humboldt County, in northern California, watching an air tanker come in for a landing. The Grumman S-2T was one of three tankers working to put out the “Red Fire,” a blaze that caught on a mountain ridge the previous day.
Hein snapped a picture of the tanker and the fire in the distance on his camera phone, which he sent to his boss: “January in Rohnerville,” the caption read.
The fire, Hein said later, is one he will remember. It wasn’t the largest fire of the year, and it didn’t claim any lives. But it burned 333 acres in Humboldt County — one of the wettest places in America. The county, which averages more than 100 inches of rain every year, is dry as a bone.
“We’re seeing summertime weather conditions in January,” Hein said as two of his crews continued to mop up the smoking remnants of the Red Fire. “If we don’t get some rain now, just imagine what the summer is going to be like.”
Across the Western United States, officials tasked with fighting forest fires worry that a confluence of factors, including climate change and human development, are conspiring to create conditions ripe for a landmark fire year. That would mean hotter fires that burn longer and threaten more homes, sapping already-strained budgets and putting at risk the lives of thousands of firefighters.
From The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/02/14/drought-stricken-california-other-states-prepare-for-landmark-year-in-fires/