The brush fires are not going away.
Despite the return of calm to the L.A. hills after last week’s Skirball and Creek fires, the Thomas Fire out in Ventura is still growing, like a monster from another world. It’s creeping into Santa Barbara County and now has burned an area greater than the size of New York City.
That’s more than 230,000 acres of charred land, and counting. This morning the fire is approaching Montecito and Carpinteria. Briefly overnight there was a scare back up in the Bay Area, which earlier this fire season suffered the deadly North Bay fires. Those caught up to people in their houses as they were sleeping.
We’ve been here before.
Year after year Southern California especially gets hit by wildfires that leave lives shattered and homes destroyed. The troubling part is that fires of this intensity are unusual in December, yet another notch on what every sane scientist has said would happen once climate change reaches a tipping point.