What triggered the enormous Sand fire outside Los Angeles is not comforting
No one is certain exactly who or what sparked the Sand fire that, according to the most recent reports, has burned a whopping 33,000 acres of Southern California around Santa Clarita.
But we do know what's greased the wheels for a fire to grow this massive and hellish: California's years-long drought and the intense heat wave impacting much of the continental United States right now.
The fire started Friday afternoon, according to Eric Holthaus writing for the Pacific Standard, in a patch of brush alongside Highway 14 in Santa Clarita. Since then, it has ravaged an area larger than the city of San Francisco. Multiple publications report that its high flames and rapid spread are very unusual for the region.
And as it burns through Angeles National Forest just north of San Francisco, its smoke is visible from much of the city. Images from photographers on the scene, like Wally Skalij, are arresting:
As Matt Hamilton and Marisa Gerber reported for the Los Angeles Times, the sweltering heat and years of meager rainfall are what enabled this fire to balloon to its current size:
The vegetation - dry from the years-long drought - fueled the fire, whose flames whipped 20 to 50 feet high and seemed to jump ahead by a quarter mile at a time, officials said.
"Five years ago, if we had a similar fire, we would have probably caught [it] at the ridge," Los Angeles County Fire Department Chief Daryl L. Osby said during a news conference this weekend.
Firefighters had to cope with heavy winds, with gusts of up to 40 mph that pushed flames into remote pockets of the hilly region. The wind pattern that initially fed the blaze began to shift Sunday, with a sea breeze blowing toward the north for much of the afternoon, then reversing about 9 p.m. The erratic shift in winds pushed the fire northeast toward Acton, where evacuations were ordered Sunday.
When Osby says the fire would have been different five years ago, he's making a point that would be obvious to anyone who lives in Southern California: SoCal's been in a state of drought since 2011.
Put another way, the last time California wasn't going through a drought, Ron Paul was mounting a serious campaign for president, there were only four "Fast and Furious" movies, and you had probably never heard of Macklemore.
The consequence of those years of dryness? Southern California has become a parched tinderbox so ready to burn that it's not even really reasonable to talk about a "fire season" in the state anymore. The entire year is now fire season. And 2016 has already been as bad as any year the state has seen.
This weekend was particularly bad for wildfires, with the heat wave and wind compounding the existing problem of the drought. The resulting blaze has forced 20,000 people to flee their homes, with fire officials asking residents to be flexible as they work in intense heat to take control of the situation.
But the long-term problem, as Climate Central's John Upton writes, is much more straightforward. Our world keeps getting warmer, which means places like California will retain less and less moisture in their vegetation and earth.
And that trend leads to ideal conditions for fires like this to keep forming.