That graph is bonkers. It's not like we haven't hard barn burners of a fire season before this year, so near doubling the previous high by June is staggering.
Controlled burns to manage debris are fine. The problem is that houses and development have been built in fire zones and make fire fighting more difficult.
Controlled burns to manage debris are fine. The problem is that houses and development have been built in fire zones and make fire fighting more difficult.
Is this likely to be a particularly bad year because of El Nino weather patterns? (I think its an El Nino year?)
Either way, shockingly bad so far. Anecdotally I work for a company with employees in several US states and people have been impacted all over the north/east. Kids home from school due to bad air, allergies, headaches if they go outside too much, etc.
Another expert I saw mentioned that their predictions of the worst-case stuff for the future is that it will be twice as bad compared to now. A lot of lives and houses, infrastructure, etc. can be lost when live in a reality where our fire fighting has to pick and choose which cities and livelihoods we save.
I'm an optimist. Just like Winnipeg figured out how to manage floods, I think we'll figure out how to manage even the worst case scenario forest fires. And some of that will be simply (and sometimes annoying) things like mandating firebreaks in rings around populated centres. So we'll look like targets to the space aliens, err, satellites.