For the first time in California’s history, a single fire complex has consumed more than 1 million acres.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said that the wildfires in California in 2020 have burned more land than all of the state’s recorded wildfires between 1932 and 1999 combined, according to the Associated Press.
“If that’s not proof point, testament, to climate change, then I don’t know what is,” Newsom said Monday.
The August Complex has been burning since mid-August and began as clusters of fires ignited by lightning strikes. Those clusters have combined into what experts have coined a “gigafire” — a single fire complex that burns at least 1 million acres of land, according to CNN.
On Monday, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection announced that the California fires broke another record: More than 4 million acres of land in California have been burned in a single calendar year.
The previous record, from 2018, was 1.67 million acres.
As of Tuesday morning, the August Complex Fire was 58% contained, according to Cal Fire.
Five of the six largest wildfires in California are from 2020, and three of those fires, the August Complex, the Creek Fire, and the North Complex Fire, have yet to be fully contained.
The fires in California have destroyed nearly 8,700 buildings and killed 31 people.
The weather forecast does not seem to offer a reprieve from the fires — with very little rain coming toward the affected regions, but winds that were exacerbating the infernos have subsided.
This is not the first gigafire to burn in the United States. Alaska’s Taylor Complex in 2004 burned 1.3 million acres, and the 1988 Yellowstone Fire in Montana and Idaho burned 1.58 million cares, CNN reported.
