After
an exceptionally warm and
dry winter, vast swaths of
the Western United States
are up in flames—and
conditions could get worse.
Several
large fires are burning in
Arizona, Colorado, New
Mexico, Wyoming, Nevada and
Utah. In Colorado, three
federal wildland
firefighters died while
battling a blaze over the
weekend.
“Significant
wildland fire activity is
occurring across multiple
geographic areas, resulting
in a substantial commitment
of incident management
teams,” the National
Interagency Fire Center
(NIFC), which coordinates
federal and state fire
operations across the U.S.,
said on Monday. The
organization on Monday
escalated the country’s
preparedness level to the
second-highest designation,
which essentially means that
all hands are on deck.
Fueled
by parched vegetation, the
fires are spreading rapidly
as unusually strong winds
extend their reach,
particularly across the
southern Intermountain West
region. The conditions are
“extraordinarily rare for
late June, and impacts will
likely be severe,” NIFC
warned on Monday.
Winter
weather set the stage for
this early and aggressive
start to fire season. As
I reported in March,
many Western states saw
record or near-record lows
in snowpack coinciding with
consistently high winter
temperatures, capped off by
a heat wave in March that
melted much of the meager
reserves. An analysis by my
colleague Peter Aldhous
shows that trend has
continued.
With
an even hotter, dry forecast
on the horizon, experts are
concerned that the fires
tearing through much of the
Southwest could be a sign of
what’s to come over the next
few months.
A
Fiery Start to Summer
With
a dense blanket of smoke
overhead, thousands of
households in south central
Colorado were told to
evacuate on Monday as the
Aspen Acres Fire exploded to
more than 20,000 acres in a
matter of hours. On the
other side of the Colorado
Rockies, close to the Utah
border, the Snyder Fire has
scorched more than 30,000
acres and claimed the lives
of three firefighters, as
my colleague Nicholas
Kusnetz reported.
Meanwhile,
several more blazes burn
across much of the interior
West, where “there’s really
not much of a hint of
moisture right now,” said
Daniel Swain, climate
scientist at the California
Institute for Water
Resources at the University
of California, Los Angeles,
in a Monday
video. “The air is
bone dry. The soil is bone
dry. The vegetation is bone
dry as well. So, it’s a
pretty serious situation.”
As
of Tuesday morning, the
Cottonwood Fire burning up
and down southwest Utah’s
Tushar Mountains was the
largest active blaze in the
U.S. at around 94,000
acres—and could become the
most destructive to property
in the state’s history,
according to Utah Gov.
Spencer J. Cox. Even so,
“Colorado has really become
the epicenter,” Swain said.
That’s
largely due to the high
winds and drought plaguing
the area, which experts call
“extreme fire weather.”
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis
declared a disaster
emergency on Saturday in
response to the Snyder Fire,
authorizing use of the
National Guard. On Monday,
83 new fires were reported
nationwide.
Some
of the most dangerous
conditions are expected on
Tuesday, when wind in parts
of Utah and Colorado could
reach up to 35 miles per
hour, The
New York Times reports.
The simultaneous blazes have
put enormous strain on the
country’s firefighting
resources, according to the
National Interagency Fire
Center.
As
of Tuesday, more than 8,200
personnel are assigned to
active incidents
nationwide.
But
the concurrent fires come at
a moment of flux for the
U.S. federal firefighting
system. Over the past year,
agencies lost many
fire-qualified staff. At the
same time, the Trump
administration in recent
months launched a
reorganization of fire
forces under the Department
of the Interior to combine
them and create an entirely
new “U.S. Wildland Fire
Service.” As my
colleague Peter
reported in May,
experts say this could be
problematic as weather and
environmental conditions are
ripe for catastrophic
blazes.
And
more fire threats loom,
including from the Fourth of
July.
Risky
Celebrations
It’s
perhaps unsurprising to hear
that fireworks are a major
ignition source, considering
fire is literally in their
name. However, what may
shock you is the scale of
this risk.
When
researchers analyzed
wildfire data from 2000 to
2019, they discovered nearly
twice as many
wildfires were recorded on
July 4 as almost any other
day in the U.S. West. And
this threat is likely to
worsen as climate change
continues to dry out the
region, experts say.
“When
our founding fathers
[adopted] the Declaration of
Independence on July 4, they
didn’t foresee that people
would be setting off
fireworks in an arid
drought-stricken western USA
on that date in the future
but that’s where we are,”
Dmitri Kalashnikov, a
climate scientist at the
University of California,
Merced, told me.
To
mitigate this risk, Utah’s
governor took the
unprecedented step of
restricting fireworks
statewide on the holiday,
though fire officials will
work with towns to designate
limited safe areas for the
pyrotechnics.
The
federal government already
prohibits the possession or
use of fireworks on public
lands managed by the U.S.
Forest Service, Bureau of
Land Management and National
Park Service. However, the
Trump administration lifted
an NPS fireworks ban for
Mount Rushmore National
Memorial in South Dakota,
where Trump is expected to
visit this week, prompting
some wildfire fears in the
surrounding national forest,
Politico
reports. Several
national parks in Utah are
already contending with
fires in the region heading
into the holiday weekend, SFGate
reports.
As
we head deeper into the
summer, extreme heat could
also ramp up fire risk,
according to Kalashnikov.
Earlier this month, he and
colleagues published
a study that found
nearly half the area burned
by fires in the West from
2001 to 2024 occurred during
or right after a heat wave.
On top of that, the area
scorched each day during the
fires was more than 50
percent larger during heat
waves than during the cooler
days before.
“That
persistence of multiple
straight days of hot weather
just sort of compounds
things,” Kalashnikov said.
“Things stay hot, they stay
dry and critically, things
stay warmer overnight too,
with lower humidity.”
Typically,
fires die down a bit during
cooler evenings, but
research shows nights are
getting hotter with climate
change, which means the
blazes can continue to grow
and become harder to
contain. With all this in
mind, Kalashnikov said
people should be extra
vigilant this fire season
and avoid activities that
could accidentally ignite an
inferno, such as leaving
behind a smoldering
campfire.
After
all, humans cause nearly 85
percent of wildland fires in
the nation.
More
Top Climate News
Around
half of all
Americans could be
impacted by a heat dome
blanketing the Midwestern
and eastern U.S. this week,
Briana
Waxman and Chris Dolce
report for CNN. It
could bring temperatures in
some cities to their highest
levels in more than a
decade, potentially reaching
105 degrees Fahrenheit in
New York. The combined heat
and humidity could drive
health problems such as heat
stress, dehydration and even
heat stroke, so medical
experts are urging people
under the dome to seek
air-conditioned spaces and
drink plenty of water this
week. Europe is also still
in the midst of a major heat
wave, which is linked to around
1,000 deaths in France.
The
Lincoln Memorial Reflecting
Pool has an algae problem,
with the organisms turning
water in the famous
historical site green less
than two weeks after
President Donald Trump’s
multi-million-dollar
renovation. This nuisance is
just one example of a much
larger algae explosion
across U.S. bodies of
water in recent years as
climate change and
pollution compound the
blooms, Sarah
Kaplan reports for The
Washington Post.
Warming waters have
triggered rampant algal
growth, which is fed even
more by runoff of fertilizer
and sewage produced by farms
and cities. While quick
fixes like chemicals may
help mitigate blooms in the
short term, these efforts
will likely struggle in the
long run because they don’t
address the root of the
problem, experts say.
Devastating
earthquakes hit Venezuela
last week,
killing more than 1,700, The
New York Times reports.
Thousands more are injured
and more than 15,000 were
displaced by the disaster,
though total damages are
still being assessed as
rescue and recovery efforts
continue. Experts say the
country lacks the
specialized equipment
necessary for rapid
assistance after such a
destructive quake.
