Adam Hernandez walked across a blackened woodland past logs smoldering near Shaver Lake, 200 miles north of Los Angeles in the Sierra National Forest. With each step, gray ash puffed from under his heavy boots, and tiny flames flickered through a thick layer of pine needles on the forest floor.
Adam Hernandez walked across a blackened woodland past logs smoldering near Shaver Lake, 200 miles north of Los Angeles in the Sierra National Forest. With each step, gray ash puffed from under his heavy boots, and tiny flames flickered through a thick layer of pine needles on the forest floor.
Hernandez, 37, is an elite firefighter who served 13 years on smoke-jumper and hot-shot crews battling some of the most intense wildfires in the American West. Now, as a Sierra National Forest fire management officer, his job is setting small fires like this one to halt an epidemic that has so far killed nearly 129 million trees on 9 million acres — an area the size of Switzerland.
Caught in the crosshairs of climate change and a century of poor forest management, the Sierra Nevada — a region that provides 60 percent of California’s water supply — is becoming a tinderbox of dead wood. The 1.2 million acres still smoking statewide include the 96,901-acre Ferguson fire, which forced the closure of Yosemite National Park for three weeks. The wildfires that have already killed 14 people and destroyed more than 1,000 homes in California this year follow the state’s deadliest wildfire season in 2017, when 1.3 million acres burned, 49 people died, and over 10,000 structures were razed.
Read more at Yale Environment 360
Image: Forest managers set this prescribed burn in California's Stanislaus National Forest. (Credit: ERIC KNAPP/U.S. FOREST SERVICE)
