In the western United States, wildfire season begins in May and lasts until October. During this six-month period, fires cause serious damage to the human population, homes, and the environment. Although wildfires are a natural part of the forest and grassland ecosystem, human activity has exacerbated the fires.
An anonymous resident of California, a state that faces brutal wildfire seasons, says that, “It’s scary when there’s a lot of fires, especially when they’re close to populated areas. It’s also concerning how these really extreme fires have become a part of our cycle of seasons.”
Wildfire season affects much of the arid West, including California, Colorado, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, and some parts of Western Canada. Many of these states issued warnings about the fires at the beginning of the season back in May. Major drought and climate patterns caused additional fear that this fire season would surpass previous ones in terms of severity. Letha Tawney, the commissioner of the Oregon Public Utility Commission (PUC), stated that unforeseen weather conditions and the abundance of dead trees made Oregon “a real, literal tinderbox, that requires sometimes an extreme response.”
Because the last wildfire season was so devastating for Oregon, the PUC worked with the public, state agencies, and companies to improve communication about and enforce safety protocols. The PUC was among several other states that worked to strengthen its infrastructure to combat wildfire season.
Most of these efforts to quell the fires focused on preventing them or stopping their spread to heavily populated areas. In southern California, utility agencies sometimes shut off power when there was a high risk of wildfire to avoid electric systems from igniting. Colorado’s government took precautions by expanding the state’s firefighting budget after the disastrous fires in 2020.
The federal government also provided support by reallocating funds to combat the fire season. Rather than issuing $3.6 billion to fight fires and $590 million for vegetation management like the past year, the Biden administration approved $2.5 billion to fight fires and $1.7 billion for hazardous fuels management and forest resilience projects. By focusing more on issues with fuel disposal and control and forest debris, this plan addresses some of the main causes of the wildfires and how to minimize them.
However, these provisions were not enough to reduce the wildfires’ damage. Although this season is less severe in comparison with 2020’s record-breaking season of 58,950 wildfires and more than 10 million burned acres of land, it has still been calamitous. Recent reports list a total of 44,647 wildfires across the US and more than 5.6 million burned acres of land from this wildfire season.
These fires have increased air pollution, putting many at risk for various illnesses. Exposure to smoke can cause eye and respiratory infections, reduce lung function, and exacerbate asthma and heart failure. Children, the elderly, and pregnant women are especially at risk for these health effects. The wildfires have a significant effect on people’s livelihoods as well as vegetation and landscape in wildfires’ paths are often destroyed. Many people have been forced to evacuate.
A key cause of these fires and their increasing severity is climate change and human interaction. Climate change and interaction account for major drought, dryer, and hotter weather, and strong winds that carry and nurture the fires.
A dry season and the onset of wildfires are a natural and expected part of our ecosystem. Erin Thornburgh, Barstow’s upper and middle school environmental science teacher, explains that “In the natural ecosystem, fires serve many beneficial roles such as removing debris and overgrowth from the forest floor thus opening up the floor to receive sunlight, nourishing the soil through ash, and promoting biodiversity of plant species.”
Human interactions, such as placing electrical wires in forests and populating environmentally unfit areas, are what have given wildfires a “bad reputation” and led to their increase in number. Without considerable intervention and restrictions on human impacts on the environment, it is likely that these harsh wildfire seasons will continue and perhaps increase in severity.
