Megan Mantia, left, and her boyfriend Thomas, who only gave his first, return to Mantia’s fire-damaged home after the Eaton Fire swept through on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025, in Altadena, Calif. (Ethan Swope/AP Photo)Southern California is experiencing it’s most devastating winter fires in more than four decades. Fires don’t usually blaze at this time of year, but specific ingredients have come together to defy the calendar in a fast and deadly manner.Start with supersized Santa Ana winds whipping flames and embers at 100 mph — much faster than normal — and cross that with the return of extreme drought. Add on weather whiplash that grew tons of plants in downpours then record high temperatures that dried them out to make easy-to-burn fuel. Then there’s a plunging and unusual jet stream, and lots of power lines flapping in those powerful gusts.Experts say that’s what is turning wildfires into a deadly urban conflagration.Speed is the killer“Tiny, mighty and fast” fires have blazed through America’s west in the last couple of decades as the world warms, said University of Colorado fire scientist Jennifer Balch. She published a study in the journal Science last October that looked at 60,000 fires since 2001 and found that the fastest-growing ones have more than doubled in frequency since 2001 and caused far more destruction that slower, larger blazes.“Fires have gotten faster,” Balch said Wednesday. “The big culprit we’re suspecting is a warming climate that’s making it easier to burn fuels when conditions are just right.”Summer fires are bigger usually, but they don’t burn nearly as fast. Winter fires “are much more destructive because they happen much more quickly” said U.S. Geological Survey fire scientist Jon Keeley.AccuWeather estimated damage from the latest fires could reach $57 billion, with the private firm’s chief meteorologist, Jonathan Porter, saying “it may become the worst wildfire in modern California history based on the number of structures burned and economic loss.”Conditions are ideal“It’s really just the perfect alignment of everything in the atmosphere to give you this pattern and strong wind,” said Tim Brown, director of the Western Regional Climate Center.Wind speed and the speed of spreading flames are clearly linked.“The impact increases exponentially as wind speed increases,” said fire scientist Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University in Canada. If firefighters can get to the flames within 10 minutes or so, it’s spread can be contained, but “15 minutes, it’s too late and it’s gone. The horse has left the barn.”There’s no sure link between Santa Ana winds — gusts from the east that come down the mountains, gain speed and hit the coast — to human-caused climate change, said Daniel Swain, climate scientist for the California Institute for Water Resources.But a condition that led to those winds is a big plunge in the temperature of the jet stream — the riv
Gio. Gen 9th, 2025
