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California wildfires and the urgency of combating climate change

Posted by: Maven on November 19, 2008 at 3:27 pm

From the California Progress Report:

While this recent spate of wildfires have been put relatively under control today, the devastation is pretty severe. The number of houses destroyed in Yorba Linda shot up yesterday, the fire in Montecito claimed several dozen more homes, and the mobile home park in Sylmar is a near-total loss:

“Even without getting back to his home, Mr. Grieb is fairly certain that all is lost. He and his neighbors have seen aerial photos of the devastated development and, in stark black and white, a chalkboard at an evacuation center lists the homes, by lot numbers, that were spared. About 124 out of 600 homes are on the list, and Mr. Grieb’s home is not among them.”

For the park’s residents, it was as if an entire village had vanished in the flames. “”I used to refer to it as our little Mayberry,” said Tracey Burns, 47. She and her partner, Wendy Dannenberg, 46, lived in Oakridge for 15 years. Ms. Burns’s parents lived nearby in a part of the complex that was spared by the fire.

“It was just a very nice community,” Ms. Burns said. “Someplace safe with a lot to offer from the pool to the tennis courts to bingo on Tuesday nights. It was a very nice way of living. People waved not because they had to but because they wanted to. We always took offense to people calling it a trailer park because you had a yard, a porch, a garage, a garden. It was a home, not a trailer.””

While some scientists are dismissing the idea that climate change has something to do with the increasing frequency of fires in the region, clearly the reduction of the snowpack in the Sierras, combined with the extended drought conditions, have extended the fire season to the point where it is year-round and unsustainable. And that is expected to only worsen in the future:

“The current drought in the Southwest may simply be part of the normal cycle of wet and dry spells. But looking over the next century, Cayan said, regions with a Mediterranean climate such as Southern California are expected to get drier. “I have to believe that is going to make us more vulnerable to some of these more intense fire episodes.””

Read more from the California Progress Report by clicking here.

November 19, 2008 · Filed Under Climate change & water supply

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