California’s wildfire season is off to its worst start in 10 years.
From the Oregon border to Napa County, Santa Barbara to San Diego, thousands of firefighters with helicopters, bulldozers and air tankers are battling hot temperatures and windy conditions at a time when, most years, summer fire season has barely begun.
Add to all that dead vegetation difficult local conditions, and the fact that the winter of 2017-2018 was drier than normal in much of the state, leaving the moisture levels of plants, shrubs and trees dangerously low.
A heat wave in recent days that sent temperatures in Los Angeles County to 115 degrees made conditions difficult for the Holiday Fire, which burned 13 homes in Goleta, in Santa Barbara County, and now is 95 percent contained.
That’s because most rain stops by April and doesn’t start again until November.
Last year’s Wine Country fires in Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino and other Northern California counties began in October, killing 44 people and burning 8,900 structures.
And the Cedar Fire, which killed 15 people and burned 273,000 acres in San Diego County, also burned that month.
“I expect this will be a challenging year because of this early activity.” The total of 196,092 acres burned in California so far this year is more than twice the average of the previous five years through July 9, which was 77,905 acres, and also far more than the average of the previous 10 years, which was 111,490 acres.
Last year at this time, only 68,647 acres had burned in California — barely one-third of this year’s total so far.
The Wine Country fires in Napa and Sonoma counties were followed in December by the Thomas Fire, which burned 281,063 acres in Santa Barbara County — making it the largest wildfire in state history — before mudslides in the burned area killed 21 people the following month.