- [Reporter] Firefighters battling around the clock tonight,
homes already destroyed.
- [Reporter] Scorching 21... - [William] Fire season
has started in the Western United States.
- [Reporter] This morning, the west on fire.
- [Reporter] Fires across the state.
- [Reporter] There is a state of emergency
in parts of Northern California.
- Here in San Francisco, a fire to the north
recently covered the city in ash.
This is what some of the cars in my neighborhood
ended up looking like.
It was a flashback to the huge fire last October
that terrorized the region
and became the most destructive fire in California history.
But fire season never really stopped in California.
It's a 12 month occurrence now,
and maybe the most frustrating thing about wildfires
is that there's very little wild about them.
In ways big and small,
wildfires are a thoroughly man-made disaster,
which means it's gonna be up to us to stop them.
- We did two things to look into this.
First, I sat down with Mike Flannigan,
a wildfire expert at the University of Alberta in Canada.
He told us about all the ways
that humans are making wildfires worse.
- [William] And two, we piled our video crew into a car
and headed for Fire Country
to see what Flannigan was talking about
and to try to see a wildfire for ourselves.
- [Rachel] So, first lesson, people start fires.
- So, globally, on average, we see 350 to 450 million hectares
burned by wildfires every year.
That's about the size of India.
- Lots of those fires are intentional.
They're often used to clear-cut land for agriculture.
But humans are mostly to blame for accidental fires, too.
Here in the US, we spark roughly 84% of them.
In California, 95%.
- [William] Causes of accidental fires run the gamut.
Firecrackers, campfires, or something as common
as a car pulling onto dry grass.
But a huge lurking culprit?
Power lines.
- [Mike] Power lines played a major role
in the fires in Northern California in 2017.
Power lines can come down in strong winds,
or trees can blow into power lines.
- [Rachel] That's an understatement.
Cal Fire investigators say electrical lines and equipment
sparked 16 of the big blazes that killed 44 people
and burned a quarter million acres in Northern California
in October 2017, and Cal Fire linked 15
of those 16 specifically to power company PG&E.
- [William] The best solution here
is to bury the power lines underground,
but that's a huge project,
and no one's jumping at the chance to pay for it.
- There's many, many miles of power lines,
and who's responsibility is it,
within municipalities, or if you have a private anchorage?
You know, it becomes a little fuzzy.
- [William] This is Coffee Park,
maybe the hardest hit community
from that record-setting fire last year.
It's still unclear who was responsible for this one,
but we are all paying for it now,
in billions of dollars in damage and lost homes, and worse.
- Of course, the primary impact is human life.
People die because of wildfires.
- [William] PG&E said in an email that, quote,
"The loss of life, homes and businesses
"in these extraordinary wildfires is simply heartbreaking,"
and that the look forward to reviewing Cal Fire's reports.
- Next, people make fires bigger.
Wildfires are only wild until they reach populated areas,
and people have made it too easy for the fire.
Some studies estimate that more than 40% of new houses
are popping up in fire prone areas.
But what's more, California's housing crisis
is driving people to cities borders and beyond.
That puts more people in fires way,
and it makes smaller, controllable burns trickier,
which are crucial to keeping these ecosystems healthy
and preventing the slow buildup of fuel.
- If you have a landscape
that has lots of human activity on it,
it's difficult to allow fire to take its natural course,
because it will bump into a community or a industry.
There's so much human activity on the landscape.
It's hard to let fires burn.
- [William] Flannigan argues that
if we're going to build right up against fire prone land,
we should at least build in a buffer.
- [Mike] Golf courses are generally
a really good fire break.
Ball diamonds, soccer fields, football fields.
All these areas are generally very good firebreaks,
so if you plan them to put them
on the outskirts of your community
and be like the first line of defense against wildfire.
- [Rachel] And finally, we've all made fire season worse.
The reason so many fires can start from a tiny exhaust spark
is that so many of these areas are tinder boxes,
and for that, we may have climate change to thank.
- [Mike] As atmosphere warms,
the ability to hold moisture increases exponentially.
This means evaporation,
evapotranspiration, increases dramatically,
and this means our fuels will be drier,
unless we get increases in precipitation.
- Studies estimate that
for every degree the temperature goes up,
you need 15% more precipitation
to offset all of that evaporation,
and we're not likely to get it.
Researchers project that drought risk in California
will only get worse as global temperatures rise.
- We're doing a uncontrolled experiment
on our climate system,
and there could be some really nasty surprises.
- [William] So, besides reducing our carbon footprint,
how do we fight back against wildfires?
Well, bury power lines, build firebreaks into communities,
do more controlled burns.
But Flannigan also thinks that sometimes,
we do well to take the humans out of the wild entirely.
- Every human-caused fire is preventable.
If you keep the people out of the forest and the wildlands,
then there's no human-caused fires.
Forest closures work.
They're not popular, but at times, it could save us
a lot of grief.
- [William] In other words,
if human-caused fires are preventable,
and humans cause most fires,
then this is a problem with a solution,
if we can actually learn lessons from the blazes
that we've already started.
- [Mike] Humans need a bloody nose or two
before we change our behavior,
and we've had quite a few bloody noses,
so it's time to start changing our behavior.
(calm music)
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