Most areas impacted by the Pickett Fire sit inside areas previously affected by the Glass Fire, which burned around this same time in 2020.
Northern California’s Wine Country has a certain propensity for catching fire. Wildfires have scorched the area with increasing frequency over the past three decades; the 2017 Tubbs Fire wiped out entire towns and destroyed at least 5,400 structures and decimated regional infrastructure, totaling over $1.2 billion in damages; even before adjusting for inflation, the Tubbs Fire remains California’s costliest wildfire to date.
As of publishing, the Pickett Fire — the largest to rage through wine country in five years — is sitting at 90% containment. Favorable wind conditions and increased aid have led to a steep rise in containment since late last week; containment percentages increased by ten points between Sunday and Monday alone. Barring any acts of God, the Pickett Fire will likely be completely contained by the end of this week.
Spanning over 6,800 acres, or nearly six Golden Gate Parks for context, the Pickett Fire is behaving differently than most Napa Valley wildfires. A comparatively small number of structures — only five, per Cal Fire’s most recent incident report — have been destroyed.
Accessibility and prompt emergency response helped steer the fire away from more populated and dense areas, aided by favorable wind conditions. But the reason for the Pickett Fire’s advantageous demeanor boils down to a singular point: It burned through a fairly recent burn scare.
The Glass Fire in 2020 burned through an estimated 67,484 acres of Wine Country in 2020 over the course of 33 days, leveling 1,555 structures; the blaze remains one of the longest-lasting wildfires on record for the region; the Picket Fire’s burn map is entirely contained the burn scare left from The Glass Fire — and shows, by proxy, the comparable effectiveness of human-caused prescribed burns.
Prescribed burns, small blazes intentionally set to mitigate future wildfires, were integral land management practices conducted by indigenous communities. Tribal records of these guided burns date back hundreds, potentially thousands of years in some areas … and well before any European colonization of the Americas; early European colonies, particularly those in the Southeastern United States, soon adopted these practices, albeit for agricultural production and not land management. When done with the applicable knowledge and foresight, prescribed burns have tangible impacts on future wildfires, oftentimes lessening their range and duration.
The reason? Simple: a reduction in flammable organic matter. Or in the case of wildfires, “fuel.”
2024 saw a record-setting number of prescribed burns set across the United States. The U.S. The Forest Service successfully treated over 325,000 acres of vulnerable land for forest health across national forests in California; of that treated acreage, 72,000 acres were prescribed burned. Outside of federal lands, California itself treats about 125,000 acres annually with prescribed burn management efforts across vulnerable communities.
Alas, the state remains woefully off target in its goals to quell fire-prone regions.
Forestry officials and fire ecologists state that some 400,000 acres of California-managed land must be manipulated with prescribed burn practices annually to mitigate the worst of wildfire damage. We’re about a quarter of the way to that goal.
California’s geographical quirks and environments — the very same natural wonders that make the state jaw-droppingly gorgeous — are innate wildfire risks. That’s not necessarily a flaw; fires are integral to the sustained health and growth of wild domains where they occur naturally. However, human-caused climate change has pushed the world into a climate crisis unlike any mass weather shift the planet’s ever seen.
To see the Earth through this particularly warm chapter, it’ll require both innovation and, in some ways, reversions — times where human and nature lived much more harmoniously.
Feature Image: Courtesy of Wikimedia
