At the time of this writing, there were 21 fires burning over 11,000 acres in West Virginia, according to the Fire, Weather and Avalanche Center. The four largest are the Steep Valley fire in the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, which has burned over 2,000 acres; the Coal Creek fire in Kanawha County, near the Boone County border, roughly 2,500 acres; the Left Fork of Long Bottom Creek fire, due north of the Coal Creek fire, around 2,400 acres; and the Glen Alum fire in Mingo County, near the Kentucky border, over 1,000 acres.
The Steep Valley fire is the one garnering the most headlines as it ravages West Virginia’s newest national park. The update Tuesday morning was that blaze was 70% contained, thanks to the efforts of roughly 70 firefighting personnel from National Parks and Forests units across the country, plus a private firefighting team from Oregon. Unfortunately, the flames have reached an area that is not easily accessible, so that final 30% of the fire will be much harder to contain.
As much as we are concerned for the damage being done to one of state’s most precious resources, we are more concerned for the safety of the firefighters and any individuals who may find themselves in the fire’s path. Thus far, there has only been one minor injury reported — and we hope it stays that way.
What’s happening in southern West Virginia right now is not an isolated incident: Southern states, from Virginia all the way down to Mississippi, are burning. The Quaker Run fire in Virginia ravaged 2,800 acres, about 670 of which were in the Shenandoah National Park. In Kentucky, more than 61 fires have burned more than 8,800 acres.
Shayne Martin, the national spokesman for the Forest Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said last week, “The Southern fire season has become more and more a fire year. … Fires are burning longer, hotter and create more destruction in recent years.”
We’re seeing that not just here, in the Southeast United States, but in Canada over the summer and out West the last several years. While there are wildfires every year — and there have been wildfires every year — climate change has made them more frequent and more severe. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Wildfires require the alignment of a number of factors, including temperature, humidity, and the lack of moisture in fuels, such as trees, shrubs, grasses, and forest debris. All these factors have strong direct or indirect ties to climate variability and climate change.”
A September 2022 study (published in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences in May) compared climate-driven, natural and historical simulations of California’s summer burned areas. The comparison showed that from 1971 to 2021, human-caused climate change contributed to a 172% increase in burned areas, with the highest jump occurring from 1996 to 2021.
Climate change is not just hotter summers and ice caps melting in far off lands. It’s not so trivial and not so distant. It is serious, and it is right here in our own backyards. Climate change is dangerous storms, historic floods, brutal droughts and devastating wildfires. And if we want to lessen the unnatural severity of these natural disasters, we must make concerted efforts to minimize humanity’s atmosphere-warming activities. And we cannot keep putting off those efforts to some mythical tomorrow, because if we wait too long, there will be no tomorrows left.
