Shocking, Deadly California Wildfires (Partly) Explained

An entire large neighborhood destroyed by Monday's
wildfire in Santa Rosa, California. 

I don't know about you, but I was as shocked as I was horrified at the extent of the wildfires that tore through  California wine country yesterday.

The fires there, and in southern California were still burning as of this morning, so the destruction will only get worse. Videos you can see at the bottom of this post give you a glimpse of the enormity of this disaster

With at least 10 people dead and more than 1,500 homes and businesses destroyed, this is the worst California wildfire since 1991, when another big fire tore through Oakland, California, killing 25 people and destroying 2,900 buildings.

Of course the death toll from this fire will probably rise, because by the looks of things, it seems like it was almost impossible in some areas to escape the fast-moving flames.  Ominously, up to 100 people are reported missing. We don't yet know whether they died in the flames, or simply got lost in the confusion of evacuations and will be found.

A home burns during California wildfires Monday

Huge tracts of neighborhoods in cities like Santa Rosa are reduced to rubble. Wineries are gone. So are ranches, business districts and resorts.

Fortunately, the winds are expected to slacken some today and the humidity might creep up a little. But the damage is done.

Several factors - some dating back to a California drought that ended last winter -  came together to create this disaster.

I suppose you can partly blame climate change for causing wild swings in weather on the West Coast for this, but I want to see more analysis before I can pin any of this on global warming.

First of all, vegetation was waiting out the drought to grow and thrive. Last winter, it rained and snowed like hell in California, and vegetation responded by growing vigorously, much of it getting thick and big.

Then California had a very hot, arid summer, and all that vegetation dried out into tinder. This time of year, many parts of California are subject to a weather pattern in which east winds flow down the slopes of hills and mountains toward the coast.

When air moves downhill like this, it dries out and warms through compression, and gains momentum until the wind funnels through passes at high speeds. The result is super hot, super windy, super dry weather, and the least little spark can set things off.

Monday's wildfires overtake this California home.
Photo by Josh Edelson/Getty Images

Then there's something called the Wildland/Urban Interface. More and more people are living at the edge or in forests and wild lands, which makes wild fires more likely to affect people.

With all these houses in the woods, the wildfires jump from house to house, which sometimes adds fuel to wildfires to turn them into firestorms that roar into towns and cities.

This appears to be what happened in Napa Valley.  We seem to be seeing this kind of disaster more frequently, largely because of this Wildland/Urban Interface, and partly because climate change is making droughts and heat waves more likely in some areas, which creates the conditions for big fires.

We saw this in Fort McMurray, Canada in 2016 and in Colorado Springs in 2013, and around Gatlinburg, Tennessee last fall.

Unfortunately, given all the factors I've cited above, Monday's California fire tragedy is not the last we will see in the near future.

Here are some videos:

A reporter was caught in the firestorm and describes what he saw:



Here's what's left of a destroyed neighborhood in Santa Rosa, California:

Deadly Portugal Forest Fire Largely A Man-Made Tragedy.

A huge forest fire in Portugal has killed at least 64 people

I'm sure most of you are horrified by the news out of Portugal last weekend, when a huge forest fire in the central part of that nation killed more than 60 people.

Lots of observers are saying that the disaster was at least in part man-made.

The Portugal forest fire hit during a spell of extremely hot, dry weather, the kind of conditions that climate change and global warming tend to encourage.

There's that, but an even bigger reason for the Portugal disaster has an even more direct line to what humans did.

As the BBC and many other media outlets note,  eucalyptus trees had a lot to do with this.

I'll let the BBC explain:

"Much of the area in flames is dominated by eucalyptus, an Australian species introduced to Europe in the 18th Century, but which really boomed in Portugal with the rise of the paper industries in the mid-20th Century.

It is one of the most profitable trees, but ecologists say eucalpytus sucks up rare groundwater and is bad for native plants and animal life. 

The sap-rich tree that now covers large parts of central and northern Portugal is also highly flammable

Eucalyptus lined route N-236, where 47 people died in their cars while trying to flee." 

On top of all that, a lot of forest in Portugal is privately owned, and much of it isn't managed well. Plenty of underbrush, dead branches and other fuels accumulated in the forests, and that contributed to the fire's intensity as well.

Worst of all, a person might have started the fire. Initially, it was thought that lightning struck a tree during a "dry thunderstorm" sparking the blaze.

But there are now reports that the forest fire was already going gang busters when the lightning struck. The thunderstorm winds might have fanned the flames, but an arsonist might have started the fire ahead of time..

We always hear of "natural disasters" as being "an act of God." and there's nothing we can do about it.

To an extent, that's true, as we can't prevent every storm, every drought, every heat wave, every hurricane, every tornado.

However, every disaster death toll is made worse by something we could have done better. Hindsight is always 20-20, but when people die in a weather calamity, it's always useful to figure out why people died and how we can prevent deaths the next time.

Because there's always a next time.