Someone on NPR today helped them earn their donations from the fossil fuel companies at the end of a report on the wildfires by saying the fires are not "caused" by global warming, most were started by human action. Of course, the problem is that global warming is causing them to be much bigger than they used to be, regardless of how they started.
https://weather.com/news/news/2020-09-09-western-wildfires-california-oregon-washington
By Jan Wesner Childs
Sept. 9, 2020
Hundreds of homes, businesses and other buildings have burned to the ground, a firefighter was critically injured and tens of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate as hot, dry and windy weather across the West left parts of California, Oregon and Washington under siege from what's being called an unprecedented fire season.
More than 96 large wildfires are currently burning over 5,400 square miles of land, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. About half of the fires are in Oregon, Washington and California.
Residents in and around Medford, Oregon, fled their homes in darkness as fire burned through the towns of Talent and Phoenix.
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Many of the blazes started on Monday and Tuesday amid record heat, drought and sometimes windy conditions.
"It took an extreme confluence of weather factors to lead to the magnitude of this latest wildfire siege," weather.com senior meteorologist Jon Erdman wrote Wednesday.
Those factors include worsening drought and the hottest August since 1895 in some western states, including California. Then came the extreme heat over Labor Day weekend, followed by high winds that created red-flag fire conditions and fueled the flames of both new and existing fires.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown called the fires "a once-in-a-generation event."
“This could be the greatest loss of human life and property due to wildfire in our state’s history,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown told reporters Wednesday.
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Several firefighters were injured, one critically, after a group of more than a dozen had to deploy a safety shelter while fighting a wildfire in Southern California's Los Padres National Forest.
The firefighters were overcome by flames Tuesday morning in the Dolan Fire, according to an update posted late Tuesday afternoon. Three were transported by Life Flight to Community Regional Hospital in Fresno. A hospital spokesperson told fire officials that one firefighter was in critical condition and the other two were in fair condition.
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The state is entering peak wildfire season but a record of more than 3,900 square miles — about 2.5 million acres — have already burned. The previous record was set in 2018 when 3,067 square miles burned. That season included the state's deadliest wildfire, the Camp Fire, that killed 85 people in the town of Paradise. In an average season, 486 square miles burn. Since 2000, the average area burned has been about 1,150 square miles.
Wildfires in the state this year have killed eight people and destroyed 3,700 structures, according to CalFire.
At a briefing Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state has seen more than 7,600 wildfires so far in 2020. By this time last year, there had been 4,927 wildfires that burned 184 square miles.
Since Aug. 15, the state has had more than 900 wildfires. Twenty-five of those have been major wildfires. The fires have forced the evacuation of more than 42,200 people, Newsom said.
More than 14,000 firefighters are battling the current blazes.
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tags: extreme weather, severe weather,
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