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California’s Problem Now Isn’t Fire—It’s Rain
Torrential rain is expected this week in Los Angeles, which risks producing flash flooding and landslides in areas stripped of vegetation by the recent wildfires.
“The risk of damaging post-fire debris flows is increasing as the climate changes, because we are seeing stronger storms, in between more intense dry times, that can lead to instability in previously burned areas,” says Faith Kearns, a wildfire expert at Arizona State University. Fire regimes are changing worldwide, and when factoring in the degradation of forest health and more intense rainstorms, that’s leading to a much greater frequency of post-fire debris flows in areas where they’ve happened in the past. The main driver here, according to Luke McGuire, a geoscientist at the University of Arizona and lead author of that study, isn’t so much that rainfall is getting heavier—it doesn’t take much rain to initiate a debris flow—but that the fires are getting worse.
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