Why California's hellish wildfires are so different than Florida's
Santa Ana winds are hot tumbles of desert-dry air, squeezed free of humidity from their travel over the Sierra Nevadas and shot like a rocket through canyon passes into the heart of the Golden State.
They are unique to California, a function of high pressure over the Great Basin that can turn the Pacific into glass with offshore winds or ignite hell on Earth from a single spark.
While Florida suffers from vast wildfires, especially during La Niña years, the Santa Anas, as well as California’s mountainous terrain and summertime dry season makes it more susceptible to the kind of killer blazes raging through the state this month.
As of late Tuesday, two people had died in the Woolsey fire northeast of Los Angeles, which had burned nearly 97,000 acres and destroyed 435 structures.
The Camp Fire north of Sacramento has burned more than 130,000 acres, destroyed at least 6,500 homes and killed a confirmed 48 people, some of whom were overcome by the inferno in their flame-scarred cars and burned-down houses.
It’s a tragedy stoked by a warming globe — longer, hotter summers, less rain — and one watched with empathy by Florida fire officials as the Sunshine State enters its own dry season.
But if Florida fires can travel 15 to 20 miles across the state’s spongy flat landscape, California’s fires sprint at 30 to 40 mph on rugged uphill slopes, said Scott Peterich, a state wildfire mitigation specialist for South Florida.
Peterich grew up about 40 miles from the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Paradise, which burned in the Camp Fire as its residents battled through flame-framed streets in desperate attempts to flee.
“That area has terrain that goes from the valley to 2,500 feet and you can get really fast-moving fires in that kind of topography,” Peterich said. “It just sucks itself up the slope. It’s hard to escape that.”
Sean Sublette, a meteorologist with Climate Central, said California can also suffer from drier vegetation than Florida after its summertime dry season. Florida’s hottest part of the year is also its wet season, so while Florida vegetation certainly dries out, it does so during the cooler months of the year.
“The Everglades, by design, are not as dry as interior California,” Sublette said. “Florida is a pretty moist place nine to 10 months out of the year and the conditions just don’t favor something like you’re seeing in California when entire cities are wiped out in 24 hours.”
Although they are not as intense or expansive as what California experiences, Florida is not immune to wildfires.
A quick-moving wildfire stoked by the outflow from a thunderstorm burned 36 homes in the Panhandle town of Eastpoint in June.
In the past decade, more than 1 million acres of state-managed land in Florida has burned, with the years of 2011 and 2017 standing out as the worst in that time span for damage.
In 2011, 221,755 acres of state land burned. Two firefighters died in 2011’s Blue Ribbon Fire about 85 miles northeast of Tallahassee when their tractors became stuck in a dry pond and amid tree stumps. According to a Florida Division of Forestry report on the incident, rangers Josh Burch, 31, and Brett Fulton, 52, were overtaken by the fire while trying to escape on foot.
Six years later, and a month ahead of the typical onset of the rainy season, tens of thousands of acres blazed in Florida, triggering a state of emergency. By the end of 2017, 201,155 acres of Florida-managed land had burned.
The two years had something in common — La Niña.
La Niña is marked by an abnormal cooling of waters in the equatorial Pacific. This ultimately shifts wind patterns and leads to warmer and drier winters for parts of the Southeast. Its hallmark impact for Florida is drought.
“The La Niña phase brings warm and dry winters on top of Florida’s seasonal dry season,” said Florida Climatologist David Zierden. “There is a strong correlation between the number of acres burned each year and what phase — El Niño or La Niña — you are in.”
Then there was the El Nino year of 1998. El Nino years typically mean a wet, cool winter for Florida. True to form, there was near record rainfall that winter Zierden said. But the rain stopped for about a three-month stretch beginning in April, allowing the top soil and plants to parch.
Nearly 507,000 acres of state-managed land burned that year.
“The conditions for extreme fire behavior are an ignition source, available fuel, low humidity and gusty winds,” Zierden said. “While we don’t get the Santa Ana events in Florida, we can satisfy all of those conditions during parts of the year.”
Zierden and Sublette pointed to conditions associated with climate change — warmer temperatures, less rain — as reasons for longer and more destructive wildfires in western states.
A Climate Central report shows spring and summertime temperatures in California have increased 1.8 degrees from the 1970s to 2015. The fire season is also 105 days longer in western states than it was in the 1970s.
“Only a couple of degrees higher temperature will lead to more evaporation,” Sublette said. “Even if it doesn’t seem like a lot, evaporation adds up.”
While Climate Central gives Florida an overall grade of C-minus when it comes to addressing climate change risks, the state does earn a B-plus for wildfire preparedness.
According to the 2015 report States at Risk, Florida has taken “extensive” action to address current risks, including conducting vulnerability assessments and having a climate change adaptation plan that covers wildfires.
“If I was living in Palm Beach County, I’d be more worried about sea level rise taking my home 20 to 50 years from now than fire,” Sublette said. “It’s not as exciting or in the news right now, but it will come, slowly but surely.”