What lies ahead for the Bay Area and beyond – Monterey Herald

A firefighter walks past a house and car burned by the Corral Fire near Bernard Road in Tracy, Calif., Sunday, June 2, 2024. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)

Grass, meets spark. Northern California residents, meet the fire.

The explosive start to the 2024 fire season — the Corral Fire near Livermore that ravaged rolling grasslands and quickly burned more acreage than California's previous 1,253 wildfires this year combined — heralds the types of fires experts say, according to residents of the Bay Area and elsewhere in the North. California can expect rapid grass fires in the coming weeks. What happens later depends largely on the weather.

Two consecutive wet winters and the end of drought conditions have kept the forest areas moist but promoted abundant growth of grasses which are now drying quickly to form beautiful golden tinder.

“We're seeing grass crops taller than six to eight feet in some parts of our backcountry, which is really going to make our fire suppression efforts difficult in the Santa Clara Unit,” said the chief of Cal Firefighter Baraka Carter, whose unit covers Santa Clara. Alameda, Contra Costa and western Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties. Dry, low-lying vegetation is vulnerable to leapfrog fire behavior that occurs when wind carries embers far and wide, Carter said. “These fires will spread very quickly. »

While the Corral Fire, which sent two firefighters to hospitals with burns, has burned down only one home, firefighters warn the flames could spread to residential areas in many neighborhoods bordering the prairies.

Three days before the Corral Fire blackened 14,000 acres in 24 hours, San Jose State University professor Craig Clements predicted that the greater Bay Area “should experience an uptick in fires.” 'grass in the coming weeks and this coming week'. Such fires are generally easier to control than wildfires, said Clements, director of the university's Interdisciplinary Wildfire Research Center.

Thanks to the moisture that heavier vegetation and trees suck up from well-saturated soils, the overall wildfire threat for the Bay Area, coastal areas and Sierra Nevada remains below normal this month, and Next, the National Interagency Fire Center reported earlier this month. month. The Sierra Foothills and Sacramento Valley also face normal levels of wildfire threat.

By August, the area is expected to return to normal, which means one to four wildfires over 100 acres or grass fires over 300 acres. Giant fires are unlikely under conditions classified as normal, Clements said.

The Bay Area is also expected to see normal conditions in September, with one major fire likely or none, according to the National Fire Center. For coastal areas and the Sierra, the heavy accumulation of dried-out grasses and shrubs and expected hot, dry weather in September could lead to a higher number of significant fires than usual, the center reported.

Clements cautioned that fire forecasts cannot fully capture the danger, even when the threat is deemed normal. “We are still at high fire risk throughout the summer because it is the daily weather conditions that play a role in the spread of fire,” Clements said.

As summer progresses into fall, larger shrubs and trees dry out, increasing the risk of fire. “We don’t know what’s going to happen in July if there’s a strong heat wave,” Clements said. “We don’t know how things are going to go in the fall.”

The coastal Pacific Ocean is transitioning from a strong El Niño to a moderate La Niña temperature pattern, which in recent years has featured less lightning than usual and sent cool breezes sweeping inland since the Northern California coast in summer, keeping prolonged hot periods to a minimum, said Jeff Tonkin, a U.S. Forest Service fire meteorologist.

“We're not expecting a very big fire season this year, at least at this point,” Tonkin said. “I'm not going to say we won't have big fires. We will have some. It may not be five to eight or ten like we saw a few years ago when we were in the grip of drought.

[In coastal zones of San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, significant fire risk may arise through the summer at higher elevations where the fog and cool air of the marine layer burn off early in the day, said Cal Fire Chief Nate Armstrong.

The vast majority of wildfires are human-caused, most of them by accident, such as when people create sparks by mowing, drag connecter chains from RVs, or fail to douse campfires, according to Cal Fire. People caused nearly 3,000 wildfires in Northern California last year, the National Interagency Fire Center reported.

Cal Fire is now conducting intensive firefighter training and vegetation reduction, as staff will soon be too busy fighting fires, Armstrong said.

Steve Cottrell, 59, has lived 18 years on a forest- and scrub-covered Los Gatos hillside uphill from The Cats restaurant beside Highway 17. The 2020 CZU Lightning Complex firestorm north of Santa Cruz that burned 85,000 acres, including huge swathes of redwood forest, put him on higher alert.

“It gets a little sketchy,” said Cottrell, a painting contractor. “The weeds get high, and then it all gets brown, and that’s when you start to worry.”

Cottrell said his landlord, a retired firefighter, diligently clears flammable vegetation from the area around his house. Fire officials want Bay Area residents to do the same.

“Most people probably don’t think it’s an issue until their home is being threatened,” said Cal Fire’s Armstrong. “Asking everyone to do their own part is really kind of our biggest thing. It’s a shared responsibility.”

Berkeley Hills resident Michael Scharff takes the threat of fire seriously — for the sake of his family, his neighbors and his 1907 wood-framed home designed by famed architect Bernard Maybeck of the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts. When the Scharffs moved in five years ago, they removed about 20 trees and lots of shrubs, and “tried to make it as clean as possible from a fire-safety standpoint,” said Scharff, 60.

The home barely escaped the devastating 1923 Berkeley wildfire and is subject to annual fire inspections. “We’ve done everything the fire department has asked us to do and more, creating defensible space around the house, and thinning trees, keeping plants away,” said Scharff, a “semi-retired” software executive.

The Scharffs attend annual meetings of a north Berkeley fire-safety group dedicated to hardening entire communities against the spread of wildfire.

“It really has to be a neighborhood approach,” Scharff said.