California grapples with the cost of a year-round fire season

Multiple fires are raging in Southern California. More than a thousand structures have burned, and the biggest fires are still completely uncontained.

Fighting those fires takes a lot of resources. And as climate change makes the fires more frequent and more intense, it takes more people, supplies and money to fight them. Just consider the fact that it’s January — so much for “fire season.”

When a fire sparks in LA County, the local fire departments usually handle it, said David Acuna, a battalion chief with California’s firefighting agency, aptly named Cal Fire.

“But when they have incidents that get out of hand,” he said, “We’ll come in and provide our incident management team.”

Which helps the local firefighters with logistics and communication. On top of those teams, Cal Fire runs a massive website with up-to-date fire info.

“So we have information on evacuation warnings and orders, which is updated moment by moment,” Acuna said. As well as shelter locations, disaster relief info, wildfire acreage and containment numbers — it’s a lot of work.

Environmental economist Judson Boomhower with University of California, San Diego said urban fires like the ones burning in LA County can get even more expensive.

“A really important driver of how much we spend fighting any given fire is is just the amount of property in the path of the fire,” he said.

That matters, Boomhower said, because it’s not like a flood. Firefighters can aim to steer the fire’s direction away from property.

“That ability to at least sometimes affect the path of the disaster makes fires different, and it’s also one of the things that adds this sort of hidden category of costs, because those response efforts are really valuable, but they’re also really expensive,” he said.

And they’ve gotten more expensive. In the past 10 years, Cal Fire’s budget has more than doubled, to $3.7 billion. Staffing also grew 80%.

Sabrina Ashjian is not surprised. She is a lawyer on the board for the Pacific region of the American Red Cross. “We have been responding over the past decade to twice as many extreme weather events,” she said.

So the fires aren’t just more expensive, but more frequent too. Traditionally, Southern California’s fire season happened in the fall. 

“And now it’s just all year round we need to be on guard and on watch,” she said.

Plus, Ashjian said, the state’s fire expenses don’t stop at firefighting. There’s also the costs of treating and managing the health impacts of smoke inhalation and all the reconstruction that has to happen after the smoke clears.