Another wildfire broke out Wednesday morning northwest of Los Angeles. Dubbed the Easy Fire, the blaze has already burned 1,300 acres according to the Ventura Fire Department. As the fire grew it quickly expanded to Simi Valley and surrounded the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library with flames causing an evacuation.
In addition to the Easy Fire, another fire also broke out east of Los Angeles in the Jurupa Valley. As of noon on Wednesday, the fire, dubbed the Hill Fire, had burned 100 acres according to fire officials.
The total fires in Los Angeles has grown to three over just as many days. In addition to the Easy and Hill Fires, the Getty Fire, which is only 27% contained, broke out Monday morning and has burned 725 acres. These fires have caused Southern California Edison to shutoff power to 68,000 customers in an effort to prevent the growth and start of new fires.
With the numbers of fires seemingly increasing everyday, the National Weather Service have issued an “extreme red flag warning” for the first time ever for Los Angeles and Ventura counties. The counties are expected to see wind gusts up to 80 mph, and the NWS says that all these variables “add up to an extreme fire weather threat, meaning that conditions are as dangerous for fire growth and behavior as we have seen in recent memory.”
According to a recently released study published in Earth’s Future, they suggest that the increase of wildfires over the last 50 years is attributed to climate change drying out the landscape. The researchers say that, “Since the early 1970s, California’s annual wildfire extent increased fivefold, punctuated by extremely large and destructive wildfires in 2017 and 2018,” equating that, “this trend was mainly due to an eightfold increase in summertime forest-fire area and was very likely driven by drying of fuels promoted by human-induced warming.”
