The California Fire That Killed 48 People Is the Deadliest U.S. Wildfire in a Century

The Camp Fire in Northern California is the deadliest wildfire in the United States in a century, according to wildfire historians.

The death toll for the blaze, which is still burning through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains outside Sacramento, increased to 48 Tuesday night as crews searched for bodies in communities that were caught in the fast-moving flames.

The Camp Fire already became the deadliest fire in California history earlier this week – surpassing the 1933 Griffith Park Fire in Los Angeles, which killed 29. It also surpassed the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, which killed 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots firefighting crew.

Not since the Cloquet Fire in 1918 has a wildfire killed so many people in the United States. An estimated 450 died in the wildfire in Minnesota. The deadliest fire in U.S. history was the Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin in 1871. At least 1,200 people died.

The grim milestone of the Camp Fire is the result of increasing development in fire-prone areas and climate change that makes wildfires more intense, experts say.

Climate change has also caused fire seasons – periods of hot, dry weather that create conditions for wildfires to spark and spread – to grown months longer in many places, Bailey says.

“California barely talks about fire season anymore; it’s [just] part of the year now. Conditions are often worse. We’re reworking conceptualization of how bad they can be.”

Wildfires are not new in the United States. In fact, 150 years ago there were probably just as many wildfires as there are today, says Adam Sowards, a professor of history at the University of Idaho.

But, he says, “we have more people so there is greater likelihood of people getting caught and also as communities build into what fire professionals call wild land urban interface.”

“Probably situations where there should be logging in some scenarios, a moratorium on building in some places. Overall we need to pay close attention to the changing climate and what that is doing to our landscape [and] taking that seriously as we plan into the future.”

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