Record heat, zero rain, millions of acres lost: Experts warn wildfires are now America’s problem to survive

Earlier this month, a balloon coated in aluminum foil—the kind normally seen at a child’s birthday party—drifted into the path of a transmission line, kindling an electrical spark that ignited dry vegetation nearby. Around the same time, a stray flicker from a welding tool landed on an equally parched forest floor several dozen miles away. 

The two wildfires—nicknamed the Highway 82 Fire and the Pineland Road Fire, respectively—have since bellowed into infernos, together consuming some 54,000 acres and burning down more than 100 homes as of this week.

Two things are unusual about these fires. One is the timing, as wildfire season historically kicks off closer to summer. The other is geography. These massive fires are not happening in California or Oregon; they are raging in Georgia, two of the 767 fires that have ignited statewide over the past 30 days. It is one of Georgia’s worst fire outbreaks in history, scorching more than twice as much acreage as the state’s five-year average, Governor Brian Kemp said this week.

Blazes in Georgia are part of a national early-season firefighting crisis. So far this year, nearly 23,000 fires have torched more than 1.8 million acres of land across the country, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, double the 10-year average this early in the season. 

A combination of drought, dense vegetation in vulnerable states, and the effects of climate change has brought on an unseasonably ferocious wildfire season to parts of the U.S., said Timothy Ingalsbee, a wildland fire ecologist and executive director of the non-profit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. With the country’s firefighting services already strained, the devastation so far could be a prelude to an unusually intense summer as fires migrate west.

“We’re seeing a rapid increase in wildfire activity,” Ingalsbee told Fortune. “Wildfire has typically been perceived as just a western problem, but with climate change, it’s not just coast-to-coast. It’s global.”

Waiting to ignite

It’s normal for wildfires to start earlier in the year out east before they appear in western states, Ingalsbee said. Ignition is more likely in spring in states like Florida and Georgia, before summer rains arrive to snuff out any flames. In places like California, meanwhile, hot, dry winds during the summer raise wildfire risk.

But eastern states rarely see fires of this intensity. The majority of the continental U.S. is parched, with drought conditions covering more than 60% of the country. Some states in the Southeast, like Florida and Arkansas, are almost entirely under drought conditions, raising the risk that fires might start and spread. It’s a similar story in the Great Plains. Nebraska, for example, more than half of which remains in extreme drought, battled the biggest conflagration in its history in March, a megafire that ripped through more than 640,000 acres of the state’s sweeping grasslands before it was contained.

Another reason has been ample vegetation which has fueled fires. They may be dealing with drought now, but last year, large swathes of eastern and central states were hammered by extreme rainfall, with most of the country east of the Rockies receiving at least 50% more rain than normal during spring and summer.

That combination of dry weather and ample fuel has turned much of the country into a powder keg waiting to catch fire, particularly in central states dominated by grasslands, according to Carly Phillips, a researcher and ecosystems scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Grasses can ignite so easily when they are dry enough. That’s the reason you use them as the base of your campfire,” Phillips told Fortune. “When the fire weather is so extreme, with low humidity and high wind speeds and that kind of thing, that just allows fire to spread very quickly.”

The final piece of the puzzle is the rise in temperatures due to climate change. A critical metric in evaluating wildfire risk is the so-called vapor pressure deficit, or the “thirstiness of the atmosphere,” according to Phillips. It’s the difference between how much water vapor the atmosphere can hold and how much is actually in the air. 

Hotter temperatures raise that deficit, causing the air to suck even more moisture out of plants and soil, exacerbating dry conditions and leaving more kindling ready to catch fire. In the western U.S., recent rises in vapor pressure deficits have been mostly attributed (68%) to human-caused climate change, studies show.

The West watches on

While most fires so far this year have been concentrated east of the Rockies, the West is preparing for a similarly intense wildfire season once summer rolls around.

Western states, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, received huge amounts of rainfall this winter, but it hasn’t been enough to resupply the region’s store of snowpack in its mountainous parts. Snowpack is supposed to naturally store water during colder months and slowly release it during spring and summer, helping mitigate dry conditions and keeping vegetation moist well into wildfire season. But this year’s drought, as well as an abnormally warm heatwave in March, has stripped away most of the West’s snow. 

“Snowpack is a key part of the western U.S. wildfire story,” Phillips said. “We know that with lower snowpack and less moisture in these ecosystems, they are certainly more primed for wildfire should an ignition occur.”

Low snowpack years likely mean a longer window for wildfires to occur, as well as a higher likelihood that severe fires can start due to drier conditions, according to a Western Colorado University study published last month. 

Lack of snow in the West removes one of the region’s only natural buffers against severe wildfires, limiting fire prevention options and potentially leaving more work for firefighting forces. But as the U.S. gears up for a potentially historic fire season, concerns linger over the capabilities of agencies tasked with managing fires.

An untested strategy in a ‘historic’ year

Federal firefighting has traditionally been split between several government bodies, including the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Last year, the Trump administration proposed an initiative to consolidate all firefighting operations and relocate thousands of federal firefighters into a single body, known as the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, which launched in January.

Advocates have framed the more centralized firefighting strategy as essential to meeting the challenge of modern fires, but critics also say that the new agency would be hobbled by the same staffing shortages federal firefighting and prevention forces have endured since last year’s budget cuts. The new agency’s rollout has also been criticized for its speed and muddled directives, as well as an apparent focus on putting out fires as soon as they appear rather than prioritizing preventive fire management.

“Conceptually, unifying and consolidating the different resources, personnel, and communication systems makes perfect sense,” Ingalsbee said. But the agency’s blanket fire suppression policy might backfire by exhausting firefighters, he added, while also leaving more unburned vegetation to build up and risk causing an even more severe or fast-spreading fire.

“By August, fire crews are burned out, beat up, and banged up from constant mobilization, and so you’re expending all their energy early in the season on fires that don’t really require full suppression,” Ingalsbee said. “It’s a waste of their effort.”

The massive reorganization of the country’s federal firefighting strategy comes as dry and hot conditions have turned the country into a tinderbox. With these climate and weather patterns likely to become even more frequent, the restructuring will quickly be put to the test.

“This could be a historic wildfire year,” Ingalsbee said. “I don’t think people can count on Uncle Sam’s firefighting army coming to their defense. They’re going to have to prepare for fires on their own.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com