There will be no rest for the tens of thousands of weary firefighters struggling to save West Coast communities from vast, wind-driven wildfires this week.
Forecasters say drier conditions and capricious wind gusts will strengthen fires that have already blackened more than five million acres and killed at least 35 people in California, Oregon and Washington.
The fires and smoke have driven hundreds of thousands from their homes and communities, with no way to know when — if ever — they might return.
President Trump visited McClellan Park CA on Monday — a relatively safe zone near Sacramento where a fire, now mostly contained, recently burned more than 363,000 acres.
What Trump saw there, scientists and elected officials say, contradicts his longstanding insistence that climate change is exaggerated or even a hoax, and that wildfires can be averted by “forest management.”
“Forest management in California is very important,” Trump told reporters before meeting with Gov. Gavin Newsome. “And now it extends to Washington and also to Oregon. There has to be good, strong forest management, which I’ve been talking about for three years with this state.”
CBS News noted that the federal government, not the state, manages many of the California forests that have burned.
“When trees fall down after a short period of time – about 18 months – they become very dry,” the president said. “They become really like a matchstick … you know, there’s no more water pouring through & they become very very – they just explode. They can explode.”
Trump also claimed the climate will “start getting cooler — you just watch.”
“I wish science agreed with you,” an unidentified state official standing nearby told him.
“I don’t think science knows, actually” Trump replied.
“State leaders have raced for weeks to contain one spiraling fire after another, straining their emergency services and prompting them to plead for help from other states and the federal government,” reports the New York Times.
For millions of West Coast residents, and millions more in states farther east, it’s not flames but dense, toxic smoke that is most affecting — particularly for those who have difficulty breathing even in the best of times.
“Scientists have warned for years that fire seasons like this could come to pass, and that the more we humans heat up the planet, the more we are increasing the odds in favor of the hot, dry conditions conducive to fires,” reports CNN.
“Talk to a firefighter if you think that climate change isn’t real,” L.A. Mayor Eric M. Garcetti, a Democrat, told CNN on Sunday. “It seems like this administration are the last vestiges of the Flat Earth Society of this generation.”
Scientists acknowledge the huge fires are appalling — but not unexpected.
“It’s shocking to see the impacts, but not scientifically surprising,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, recently told the online news network. “This is in line with essentially every prediction for what could happen this year and the trends we’re seeing over years and decades.”
So far this year, reports the Los Angeles Times, fires have burned more than 3.3 million acres in California — nearly double the previous record set just two years ago — along with more than 1 million acres in Oregon and more than 625,000 acres in Washington state.
Ironically, scientists say, the latest surge in the wildfires was driven by a huge blast of unseasonably cold air that dove south from Canada into the Rocky Mountains last week. As that frigid air sank, it boosted air pressure at the surface, driving powerful winds west, fanning and spreading the fires already burning in the coastal states.
