California fires are early, unpredictable after winter rain

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES

Timber and brush parched from a yearslong dry spell and thick grass that grew after drought-busting winter downpours are making for early and unpredictable wildfire behavior that California officials haven’t seen for years, if at all.

Dense layers of new grass are providing a “fine fuel” for flames that then gain speed and intensity by moving through “standing dead fuel” made up of vegetation and trees that shriveled during the state’s six-year drought, said Kathleen Schori with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

“It’s difficult to remember a year quite like this one,” she said Tuesday. “There’s such a mix of fuels that these large damaging fires are starting at least a month earlier than usual.” The result, she said, could be a longer and more destructive fire season than California has experienced in a while.

Crews were making progress against dozens of wildfires across California, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.

Authorities surveying the damage from a blaze in Northern California said Tuesday that at least 36 homes and 37 other buildings had been destroyed near the town of Oroville, about 150 miles northeast of San Francisco.

Residents had started to return home after fleeing a wildfire in the grassy foothills of the Sierra Nevada, about 60 miles north of Sacramento, but at least 4,000 were still evacuated. The blaze burned nearly 9 square miles and injured four firefighters. It was partially contained.

Schori said this year’s conditions were similar to California’s 1979 wildfire season, which came on the heels of a two-year dry spell and saw blazes blackening a total of 386 square miles of grass, brush and timber and caused more than $30 million in damage.

However that year’s major fires didn’t kick off until well into August, she said, as did the destructive 1992 blazes that followed a drought that started five years earlier.