A wildfire that broke out over the weekend in the mountains northwest of Los Angeles has quickly scorched more than 14,000 acres of grassland and scrub, and experts are warning that it could be a dangerous, long-lasting fire in the West.
“This is just a taste of what's to come,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The blaze, dubbed the Post Fire, broke out Saturday afternoon near Interstate 5 about 45 miles from Los Angeles, authorities said. The blaze forced the evacuation of about 1,200 people from Hungry Valley Campground, a state recreation area popular with off-road vehicles. Officials also closed nearby Pyramid Lake, a weekend destination for boaters.
As of Sunday afternoon, the fire was about 2% contained, making it the state's largest wildfire so far this year, according to CalFire.
The Post Fire burned about 10,000 acres in less than 12 hours, according to Los Angeles County Fire Department spokesman Kenichi Haskett. High temperatures, dry conditions and strong winds caused it to spread quickly, he said. Wind gusts of up to 50 mph on the ridge tops made fighting the fire especially difficult. For example, when firefighters dropped water from planes, “it just splashed everywhere,” Haskett said.
High winds are expected to continue through Sunday and into Monday, but Haskett said fire officials expect to make significant progress in fighting the fire over the next few days.
“Our goal is to get it done hopefully this week,” he said.
Two buildings, a campground concession stand and another recreation facility, were damaged, but no homes have been destroyed so far, Haskett said.
Still, authorities are urging residents around Castaic Lake, another popular weekend tourist destination, to prepare to evacuate if winds continue to push the fire south, he said.
On Sunday afternoon, another fast-spreading forest fire, the Max Fire, broke out about 50 miles east of the Post Fire, burning hundreds of acres near homes in Lancaster, a city of about 170,000 people. Authorities ordered some residents to evacuate, but by Sunday evening, the Los Angeles County Fire Department said “fire progress had stopped” in X.
Swain said the post-fire outbreak alone is unlikely to break any records or cause widespread damage, but he added that the speed at which the fires are spreading and the fact that it's only mid-June show why Californians should be on heightened alert heading into the summer, even after two wet winters.
Climate change is increasing the frequency of extreme precipitation events, with California experiencing particularly severe drought and heavy rain events in recent years.
“There's a cycle of more and less rain,” Dr Swain said. “We're used to it.”
But global warming trends are exacerbating the effects of these fluctuations, he said.
A record-breaking rainy season followed years of devastating drought in late 2022 and 2023. So much rain fell during the summer and fall, when fire risk is higher than normal, that normally flammable vegetation was still green and wet.
California also had a lot of rain last winter, which helped encourage even more plant growth.
But Dr Swain said the West had a hot late spring, with Las Vegas breaking records this month, and hot and humid conditions are expected to continue.
That heat sucks moisture out of grasses and shrubs that have grown over the past two years, turning them into a thick carpet of tinder, and the hotter and drier it is, the faster vegetation can turn into fuel for a fire.
“The dryness is not record-breaking at the moment, but it's the amount of fuel that's unusual,” Dr Swain said.
He said grasslands tend to burn first because they dry out the quickest, but continued hot, dry conditions, combined with fearsome fall winds like Southern California's notorious Santa Ana winds, could mean residents experience an active fire season that lasts well into the fall.
Of course, Western residents are still subject to some degree of randomness: Lightning strikes and human-made accidents helped California's 2020 wildfire season go from bad to devastating.
State and federal officials have stepped up efforts to prevent wildfires, particularly through planned burns — intentionally starting fires when conditions make them easier to contain — to reduce the amount of fuel on the ground.
But Dr Swain stressed that no matter what preventative efforts are made, climate change is making everything more unpredictable and dangerous.
“The worse the conditions, the greater the chance of bad luck,” he said.
Yang Zhuan Contributed report.