Is the wildfire season over? Rain, snow headed to California bring hope after brutal year

High winds Monday prompted warnings of more wildfires in parts of the north state, and a small grass fire threatened homes near Roseville.

But the prospect of rain and snow in the immediate forecast means the California wildfire season is likely nearing its end.

Southern California has already been soaked, and the north state is set to have more than a foot of snow just in time for the Thanksgiving travel rush. Despite one of the driest starts to the rainy season in years, the heavy soaking expected this week will likely mark the unofficial end to the fire season, experts said.

Nonetheless, Deputy Chief Scott McLean, a spokesman for Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, isn’t ready to call an end to fire season just yet. “You know how fickle the weather is in California,” McLean said. “But anything significant is definitely going to help.”

On Monday, a fast-moving grass fire in an industrial area of south Placer County prompted evacuations near Lincoln. The Foothill Fire quickly burned through more than 350 acres, according to Cal Fire.

The fire came as the National Weather Service said wind gusts as high as 35 mph would elevate fire risks in places like Paradise, which was destroyed last year by the Camp Fire.

Beyond Monday, however, the danger appears to be lessening.

The forecast calls for up to an inch of rain in the Sacramento Valley starting Tuesday, with several inches of snow and rain in the Sierra, said Steve Leach, a fire weather meteorologist with the National Interagency Fire Center’s Predictive Services office in Redding.

Once that precipitation is in the ground, it should tamp down much of the region’s fire risk for the balance of the season, he said.

“We’re going into a wetter pattern; we have very short days,” he said. “Drying is minimal this time of year. Once you get water on the ground this time of year, you don’t get as much drying.”

Cal Fire’s statistics show the season has been mild, particularly when compared with the horrific fire seasons of 2017 and 2018 that destroyed thousands of homes and killed more than 130 people. According to Cal Fire, so far a total of 252,700 acres have burned this year. Through all of 2018, the state lost 1.67 million acres to fire. The figures include fires on U.S. Forest Service land.

Still, the frightening Kincade Fire in late October, and a flurry of Southern California fires that killed three people, showed that California remains vulnerable to big fires despite a host of initiatives launched by Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature in the past year. And the fire season stretched longer into the fall than is typical in the north state.

“Just a decade ago, it was unimaginable that we’d be talking about fire weather at Thanksgiving,” said Jeff Mount, a water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California. “But this is part of this longer trend we’ve seen in the last 20 years ... of basically us compressing our precipitation down into a few months.”

Leach said the weather cooperated in multiple ways to keep a repeat of 2017 and 2018 from happening again. Late spring rain and snow helped keep a lot more moisture in the ground.

Once the summer began, “it was slow to dry out,” he said. “Our summer was not that intense in terms of heatwaves. This might be considered the type of summer we used to see more often in Northern California.”

Even as the vegetation dried out, Mother Nature helped: There wasn’t as much lightning as usual in the mountain ranges. And while it’s true that the seasonal winds did kick up in September and October, there weren’t as many fires ignited, and fire agencies did a better job of being in a position to snuff them out quickly, he said.

More fire crews added

The state increased its wildfire budget this year, spending $67 million to hire more fire crews. It also devoted more resources to “fuel reduction” projects in high-threat zones.

Leach declined to say whether the electric utilities’ decision to impose “public safety power shutoffs” more aggressively than in years past made a difference. PG&E Corp., in particular, engineered nine different blackouts, including one that covered a record 973,153 homes and businesses in late October. The latest blackout, just a week ago, left 48,000 customers without power.

The blackouts were extremely controversial and prompted a considerable backlash from Newsom and other public officials who criticized PG&E for not maintaining its grid adequately. PG&E botched communications in the first major blackout in early October so badly, allowing its call center to get swamped and its website to crash, that it is offering credits totaling $90 million to the 738,000 affected customers.

The single worst fire of the year — the Kincade Fire, which forced the evacuation of 180,000 people in Sonoma County in late October — occurred even as one of the blackouts was under way. The fire apparently was caused by problems on a long-distance, high-voltage transmission line that PG&E had kept energized. The fire burned 77,000 acres and destroyed 374 homes and other buildings but killed no one.

PG&E, which was driven into bankruptcy by billions in liabilities from the 2017 and 2018 fires, defended the blackouts as necessary to prevent more fires as high winds struck the state. PG&E and other utilities also ramped up their tree-trimming and other “grid hardening” activities on orders from state officials.

“We welcome the precipitation and wet weather this week,” PG&E spokeswoman Ari Vanrenen said in a prepared statement. “We remain focused on working long term to mitigate wildfire risk, decreasing the scope, scale and duration of Public Safety Power Shutoffs and keeping our customers and communities safe in an evolving climate.”

The utility noted as it defended its blackout last week that this start to California’s rainy season was the second driest in California in 100 years. More than 80 percent of California is “abnormally dry” or in moderate drought, according to the United States Drought Monitor.

Drought won’t be over

Federal forecasters warn that long-term modeling shows that drought is likely across parts of California through February.

But when it comes to California’s boom or bust weather patterns, experts caution long-range predictions are notoriously unreliable this time of year.

“One could argue a flip of a coin is arguably more reliable,” said Mount, the water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California.

California usually receives the bulk of its rainfall in a half dozen or so major storms known as atmospheric rivers that tend to hit the state between December and March.

“That’s where we get those storms that make or break us,” Mount said.

In other words, it could go weeks without rain, punctuated by a series of powerful storms that can bring the state back from the brink of drought.

The good news on the drought front is the state is going into the rainy season with its major water-storage reservoirs in excellent shape.

Almost all of California’s major reservoirs’ water levels are at or above long term averages. Water stored in the massive lakes is used to supply water to farms and cities throughout the dry season, which usually begins in late spring.

This story was originally published November 25, 2019 at 11:59 AM with the headline "Is the wildfire season over? Rain, snow headed to California bring hope after brutal year."