By Scott Sandell, February 11, 2022
Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Friday, Feb. 11, and I’m Jared Servantez, the City Desk’s night editor, filling in for Justin Ray.
Early February is not a time Southern Californians expect to evacuate their homes under threat of wind-whipped flames. But wildfire is increasingly becoming a year-round concern.
Driven by unseasonable heat and gusty Santa Ana winds, two brush fires brought acrid smoke, evacuation orders and flaming fronts — harbingers of a difficult fire year to come for parched Southern California, my colleagues Hannah Fry, Cindy Carcamo and Gregory Yee write.
In coastal Orange County, where the Emerald fire broke out around 4 a.m. in the wilderness area between Laguna Beach and the community of Emerald Bay, deputies knocked on doors and called out from patrol car loudspeakers, trying to wake sleeping residents and urge them to leave. With winds gusting up to 40 mph, the urgency was great.
Fire crews mounted an attack, including from above with firefighting helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, and were able to get a handle on the 145-acre blaze, preventing any of the multimillion-dollar homes in the area from burning. Evacuation orders were lifted at 3 p.m.
While they worked to contain that fire Thursday afternoon, another blaze broke out dangerously close to homes, this time near Whittier. At seven acres, the Sycamore fire had a much smaller footprint, but the flames charging up a hillside near Sycamore Park destroyed two homes and damaged another, the L.A. County Fire Department said. One person was taken to a hospital with burns and was expected to survive.
Within hours, firefighters had halted the blaze’s progress, though they, too, faced hot and dry conditions, with temperatures in the 80s and 18% humidity.
And with these winter heat waves and extended droughts becoming increasingly common, fire officials say it may be time for Californians to rethink the meaning of “fire season.”
“We no longer have a fire season. We have a fire year,” Orange County Fire Authority Chief Brian Fennessy said as his crews battled the Emerald fire. “This is supposed to be the middle of winter, and we’re anticipating 80- to 90-degree weather. Even though the hillsides are green, it doesn’t take but low humidity and wind to cause fires to occur.
“If this is any sign of what’s to come throughout the rest of the winter and spring, we’re in for a long year.”
After a 2021 fire season that saw mountain towns destroyed and wildfires burn from one side of the Sierra Nevada to the other for the first time in recorded history, a string of powerful storms hit California in December, replenishing thirsty reservoirs, bolstering the snowpack and perhaps assuaging the fears of a fire-weary state.
The reprieve, it seems, was short-lived.
January and February are typically the two wettest months in Southern California. But as my colleague Paul Duginski writes, an unusually strong high-pressure system has denied the region any meaningful rain since those drenching storms of December.
The storm track flowing from the Gulf of Alaska is forecast to change course next week, making its way around that high pressure to bring much cooler temperatures, and possibly a few showers, to the West Coast.
But time is running out. California generally has only the rest of February and March to get meaningful precipitation before the rainy season comes to a close. If brush and other dry fuels go without rain for another several weeks, the Golden State could be facing another year of catastrophic wildfires in 2022.
(Sources: Los Angeles Times)
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