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At Least 2 Dead as California Wildfires Spread: Live Updates [1]
['Corina Knoll', 'Soumya Karlamangla', 'Judson Jones', 'Emily Schmall', 'Tim Balk', 'Kellen Browning', 'Orlando Mayorquin', 'Katie Mogg', 'Matt Stevens', 'Troy Closson']
Date: 2025-01-08
Scenes of Los Angeles residents fleeing flames with moments to spare call to mind some of the deadliest wildfires in United States history: the blaze that destroyed the town of Paradise, Calif., in 2018; the 2021 Marshall fire in Colorado; the Maui inferno of 2023.
A big reason those fires were so devastating was how quickly they spread, overwhelming fire crews and leaving scant time for people to evacuate. Which is why it’s unwelcome news for the American West that scientists have found that fires across much of the region have become faster-moving in recent decades.
The findings, which were published in October in the journal Science, were based on an analysis of 60,000 wildfires in the contiguous United States between 2001 and 2020. The study’s authors classified each blaze by the largest acreage by which it grew in a single day. They found that these growth rates had increased over the decades in California and other parts of the West.
The researchers didn’t try to pin down what might explain the trend. But Jennifer Balch, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, said she believed warming temperatures had a lot to do with it. Many places in the West are becoming more intensely hot and dry, which bakes the landscape and makes it flammable.
“If you throw wind on top of that, that’s when you can get really significant disasters,” Dr. Balch said.
So far, the fires burning around Los Angeles on Wednesday don’t rival history’s speediest ones in terms of how quickly they’ve spread. Since it was first reported on Tuesday, the Palisades fire has grown to more than 2,900 acres. The Eaton fire, near Pasadena, has swelled to 2,200 acres.
The fastest growing wildfire in modern California history, according to Dr. Balch and her colleagues’ analysis, grew by around 120,000 acres in a day at its peak. That was the 2020 cluster of blazes in Northern California known as the August Complex fire, which is still the state’s largest on record.
All the ingredients were in place this week for severe wildfires in Southern California. The area had a record-hot summer followed by a dry fall. Then came the infamous Santa Ana winds, which fan many blazes in fall and winter.
The winds themselves are a natural occurrence: First, high-pressure air is trapped by the mountains around the Great Basin region, which encompasses much of Nevada and part of Utah. Then, when the air spills through mountain passes and slides downhill, it becomes warmer and faster before eventually turning into gusts that howl through the canyons and valleys of Southern California.
As humans warm the planet, scientists have predicted that high-pressure systems over the Great Basin will weaken as the desert warms more than the ocean. That could lead to fewer Santa Ana events, researchers said in a study published in 2019.
Crucially, though, the decline is expected to be sharper in fall and spring, the study found. That leaves plenty of wind to drive fires in the winter months.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/08/us/california-wildfire-la-palisades
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