Weather expert on wildfires: We did this to ourselves

If it feels like, and smells like, the entire West Coast is on fire, that’s because it is. The many raging wildfires burning from California through British Columbia are the result of decades of poor land management that has stood in the way of the natural order. Now, nature is fighting back.

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That’s according to Los Angeles weather expert and NBC meteorologist Anthony Yanez. California has been experiencing yet another season of strong wildfires ripping across the state. Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia are fighting their own fires. Smoke from these wildfires lingers along the West Coast — something Western Washington is well aware of.

“We build in areas that we shouldn’t, and you look at video where homes go up and they are right next to the trees; they are right next to the forest,” Yanez told KIRO Radio’s Ron and Don Show. “As a firefighter, how do you protect that home? It’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous to live in the mountains, but when you are that close, and there is a fire, it naturally is going to head your way.”

It’s not just building homes in places where wildfires commonly burn through the wilderness. It’s a combination of actions and factors that have been mounting for generations: conservation and land management policies, climate change, construction, etc.

“We started building a lot of beautiful homes in the mountains and whenever there was a fire, we put it out right away,” Yanez said. “This was all along the entire West Coast and we didn’t let fire do what it does. There is excess fuel out there and when you get that, these fires turn into infernos.”

“We did a lot in the 1970s with the Clean Air Act, because the air quality was really poor,” he said. “The one thing we didn’t do was fire suppression, we stopped that. We’ve gone all those years since the ’70s, almost 50 years when we stopped letting fires do what they do. We took an ecosystem sustained by fire, and turned it into one that is destroyed by fire.”

West Coast wildfires

State agencies once let wildfires burn instead of trying to suppress each and every one. The fires ate up dry vegetation – fuel – over time. That left material for the next round of vegetation to thrive in. But that dry vegetation has been allowed to pile up, unlike before — waiting for a spark.

“Even before we got here, the Native Americans understood that when there’s a fire, you let that go because the land is going to come back better than it was,” Yanez said.

“With all this excess fuel, and you get the summers that we’ve had on the West Coast over the past several years, you have that fuel, you have the hot and dry weather, you have the topography, and things go up in smoke,” he said. “That’s what’s been happening.”

It’s difficult not to look at climate change as one element in the wildfire equation. How much it contributes is still up for debate. Still, it’s yet another factor that humans have created for themselves.

“There’s always been wildfires, there’s always been heat waves, but now there’s this new element with climate change and warmer temperatures,” Yanez said. “So how does that fit in? You are really seeing what happens when it’s extra hot, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how much of a factor it is. But you can’t ignore it – you can’t overplay it, and you can’t underplay either. It is a factor.”