What caused California’s deadliest wildfires?

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The wildfires raging in California since late last week are now officially the deadliest in the state’s history, with a further 13 fatalities reported.

The total death toll now stands at 44 as first responders battle “blazes on both ends of the state”, says CNN. Southern California’s Woolsey Fire has killed two people so far, while the remaining confirmed victims died in the more widespread Camp Fire in the north.

According to the authorities, about 100 people are still unaccounted for across the state.

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The death toll is expected to keep climbing, with the strong Santa Ana winds in the south likely to bring “gusts near hurricane force” today, says the broadcaster’s meteorologist Dave Hennen.

Although officials are still investigating how the fires started, Donald Trump has blamed the spread of the blazes on California’s forest management. The president is threatening to withhold federal payments from the state.

Trump’s response, which has sparked outrage from local leaders and firefighters, has “oversimplified” the causes of California’s wildfires, says The New York Times.

These fires “aren’t even in forests”, says Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The Camp and Woolsey fires began in inhabited areas close to undeveloped land, making it “easier for fire to move from forests or grasslands into neighbourhoods”, says the newspaper. “Researchers are attributing at least part of the difference to climate change, because in a warming world vegetation dries out faster and burns more easily.”

But Trump may be partly correct in his assertion that “management” has played a role in the spread of fires in the past.

“Several ecologists have pointed out that ‘management’ is typically code for logging by industry, whereby large stands of trees that would typically survive a wildfire are removed, leaving behind debris that is often more effective at spreading flames,” says The Guardian.

However, 60% of the state’s forests are under federal management rather than the control of the state.

The fact that the number of people moving into the urban-wildland interface had increased by 5% – particularly in California, according to a 2015 report by the United States Department of Agriculture – is also a factor in the higher number of deaths from wildfires in recent years.

“We have vulnerable housing stock already out there on the landscape. These are structures that were often built to building codes from earlier decades and they’re not as fire resistant as they could be,” said Moritz. “This issue of where and how we built our homes has left us very exposed to home losses and fatalities like these.”

At some point California, along with the rest of the West, is going to have to face the challenge of a growing population living on land that will be scarred by “ever greater fires as temperatures warm”, says The Guardian.