Even with all the wildfires California has endured, it was a shock to see flames searing the Big Sur coast this week — in the middle of winter.
The January blaze, which on Wednesday had burned 700 acres and still was smoldering near homes in the rugged Palo Colorado Canyon, is believed to be the result of a stray ember from a burn pile. Scientists, though, say the fire was made possible by an unusually long dry spell in winter coupled with a landscape increasingly primed for fire by the warming climate.
The winter months are typically when the state gets its heaviest rains and a break from wildfire. But Big Sur has seen less than a 10th of an inch of rainfall this month. Despite the onslaught of storms in December, many coastal areas are dry again and brimming with dead, combustible brush after two years of drought intensified by climate change.
“I was totally surprised by the fire,” said Craig Clements, professor of meteorology at San Jose State University and director of the school’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center. “But after looking at some of the data, I was like, ‘Yeah, it makes sense.’”
Because of rising temperatures and more intense bouts of drought in recent decades, the window for wildfires has grown, and California’s fire season is now longer than it used to be. A study by the science and news organization Climate Central estimates that the threat of wildfires in Western states lasts 105 more days today than it did in the 1970s.
Over the past 10 years, some of California’s worst fires have erupted on the cusp of winter. The Central Coast’s 281,893-acre Thomas Fire in 2017, the eighth largest in state history, ignited Dec. 4, and burned through mid-January. The 2018 Camp Fire, the state’s deadliest blaze, began in November, even after a period of rain, and burned through Thanksgiving. In Big Sur, the 2013 Pfeiffer Fire destroyed 34 homes shortly before Christmas.
The potential for flames this winter remains particularly high because many areas of the state have experienced their two driest back-to-back years, as well as record heat.
“More drought creates a longer fire season or even a continuous fire season through
On Friday, when the Colorado Fire broke out on scrub-covered coastal hills about 20 miles south of Carmel, conditions in Big Sur were ripe for burning.
The only rain the region had seen this month was on Jan. 7, and just 0.08 of an inch at that, according to National Weather Service data. Big Sur Station, where the weather service keeps a monitoring gauge, averages 8.16 inches of rain in January.
Meanwhile, high temperatures for the month were running nearly 4 degrees above average.
As a result, moisture levels of dead fuels, the vegetation that typically feeds fires, like grasses and pine needles, were in the single percentages, according to estimates from San Jose State’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center.
Making matters worse, winds had picked up Friday before the fire started, gusting to about 30 mph out of the northeast.
“The weather conditions were dry and breezy,” said Roger Gass, a forecaster with the National Weather Service who was working that night in Monterey. “It just reminds folks to always be vigilant.”
Investigators with Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, announced Tuesday that the Colorado Fire was caused by hot embers spread from a burn pile amid strong winds. Fire officials did not immediately disclose where the burn was or who lit it and whether anyone would be cited for a crime.
LeRoy Westerling, a climate scientist at UC Merced, says such out-of-season blazes, no matter what the cause, are likely to become more frequent because temperatures are going up, and California’s forests and grasslands simply aren’t suited to the heat.
“In a sense, we have a lot of vegetation on the landscape that no longer matches the climate system,” he said.
In order to get things in balance, California would need to get a lot more precipitation on its wildlands, he said, and that’s not happening.
The past two years have seen record acreage burn. In 2021, fires consumed 2.6 million acres in California, about a million more than the five-year average, according to Cal Fire. In 2020, 4.2 million acres burned.
As of Wednesday, firefighters appeared to have the upper hand on the Colorado Fire. It was 55% contained, Cal Fire officials said, and hundreds of residents who were forced to evacuate had begun returning to their homes. Scenic Highway 1, which had been closed between Garrapata Creek and Point Sur, was reopened.
One yet-to-be-identified structure had burned, officials said, and across social media, stunned Californians were still circulating photos of flames above the ocean and beside the iconic arches at the Rocky Creek and Bixby bridges. Nearly 500 firefighters were working to control the blaze.
“We’ve had fires in December, January and February,” said Jon Heggie, a Cal Fire battalion chief. “It’s on the rarer side, but it’s not out of scope of what we’re seeing now.”
