The West is most at risk, where more than two-thirds of the homes burned over the last 30 years were located. Of those, nearly 80% were burned in grass and shrub fires.
A grass fire burns adjacent to Crystyl Ranch in Concord, Calif., on Friday, June 29, 2018. On Thursday, March 14, 2024, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara unveiled a proposal for letting those insurers use computer models of possible future catastrophes to justify rate increases. The plan is part of a yearlong effort to overhaul regulations and ease the insurance market crisis in the wildfire-stricken state.
Grass fires are typically less intense and shorter-lived than forest fires, but can spread exponentially faster, outrun firefighting resources and burn into the growing number of homes being built closer to fire-prone wildlands, fire experts told CNN. One part of the equation is people are building closer to fire-prone wildlands, in the so-called wildland-urban interface. The amount of land burning in this sensitive area has grown exponentially since the 1990s. So has the number of houses. Around 44 million houses were in the interface as of 2020, an increase of 46% over the last 30 years, the same study found.
Rainy springs fuel more grass growth. Then it goes dormant, or plays dead, in the winter. Warmer winters with less snow cover, especially in, expose the grass to warmer, drier spells in the late winter and early spring, according to King and Todd Lindley, a fire weather expert for the National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma.
“When I started 30 years ago, a big fire was 30,000 acres, and now that’s normal, that’s typical,” said King. “I’d have maybe one a year, one every couple of years of that size, and now we hear of 1-million-acre forest fires.” “You could have green grasses coming up in a burned-grass landscape within a day or two, that’s how fast it rejuvenates,” King said.“Forest recovery could take years or generations, or never recover in our lifetime, or our generation’s.”