“It certainly made things difficult,” Morris said.

But thousands of lightning strikes are not common. Thunderstorms are not unusual in California’s mountains, especially during the monsoon season. The storm was created by the collision of two powerful weather systems and did produce rain, but high in the atmosphere. “Fires were established simultaneously in multiple CAL FIRE Units and national forests,” the report said.Īnd, in what would become an oft-repeated phrase during the 2020 fire season, “The volume of incidents challenged available resources and immediately strained the California mutual aid system.” “Once we hit that lightning siege, it became evident that this was really an historic event.”įires grew large and merged into mega-complex blazes, setting up a multi-pronged fire-management nightmare. “It was a normal fire season until that point,” Morris said. Making matters worse, the dry storm was followed by warm winds, fanning fires in all directions. Rather than water raining down on bone-dry forests, the skies lit up with more than 15,000 lightning strikes, sparking fire after fire. A storm slammed into central and Northern California, offering fire bosses the hope that the system would produce rain to smother the fire threat in the region. Something remarkable happened the weekend of August 15, 2020. Here are some key numbers pulled from the report: 15,000 “It’s still hard to believe.”Ī hard copy of his Fire Siege report has been placed in every Cal Fire station in the state. The fire burned over two days and nights, killed 86 people and ended only with rainfall and snow.Īn hour and a half long flight over last summer’s August Complex fire, viewing mile after mile of burned forests, gave Morris a perspective of just how substantial the 2020 fires were. The infamous Big Burn was an out-of-control conflagration in the summer of 1910, coalescing thousands of fires that burned 3 million acres in parts of Idaho, Montana, Washington and British Columbia. The 2020 fire year “is on a scale that has not been experienced in California in at least 100 years.” George Morris III, Cal Fire

This one will likely inform the next century.” The Big Burn is what started the wildland fire suppression systems of that century. “To me, this is the 1910 watershed moment of this century. “That is on a scale that has not been experienced in California in at least 100 years. “The number for me is that astonishing 4.2 million acres,” said Morris, who comes from a family of firefighters and who is responsible for six of the state’s 21 fire units. Morris wrote a 122-page report that is a compendium of relentless statistics and gripping narratives. In the middle of last year’s desperate firefight, he was assigned to compile an historical account in part so the agency could learn lessons from the record-breaking season. George Morris III, an assistant regional chief for Cal Fire, dwells on all these numbers. The state’s first giga-fire - the August Complex - alone consumed one million acres in the northern Coast Range.īefore the season was over, 31 people, including 3 firefighters, lost their lives. The 4.2 million acres burned last year is equivalent to the entire area of Los Angeles, Orange, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties combined.

California wildfires 2020 map