California, still recovering from January’s catastrophic wildfires that caused between $250 and $275 billion in total damage and economic loss, is bracing for more destructive weather this summer.

The summer is typically the worst for wildfires, and this year could be one of the most brutal yet, according to weather forecasters. The news came amid politically charged anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Los Angeles.

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Each summer, rising temperatures and dry air sap moisture from the landscape, leaving vegetation brittle and prone to burning.

“This summer looks to be pretty high in the record books, and that has some significant implications for fire season,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California. 

Already, forecasters have said they are seeing troubling signs that the pattern of rising temperatures, dry air, and parched plant life could be more intense than in previous years.

Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada — a key source of spring moisture — has mostly vanished after melting earlier than usual. Northern California, which saw more rain than the south, produced an abundant grass crop that is now drying out and feeding early-season fires. And ominous warnings from forecasters that the summer will be unusually hot point to an increased risk of large wildfires, with even a small spark capable of rapidly growing into a major blaze.

Several small fires have already raced across northern California, where the grass crop has dried out. In May, the Inn Fire burned in the Eastern Sierra foothills, threatening Mono City. The 728-acre fire, now fully contained, climbed more than 3,000 feet in elevation “over half a mile vertically as it spread upslope into steep, high-altitude terrain,” the Forest Service said.

“This fire activity in the Eastern Sierra kind of worries me,” Tim Chavez, an assistant chief with Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, told the New York Times. “I can’t remember a fire in the Eastern Sierra that went up the mountains like that one did. Usually they burn through the river bottom and stay in the flats, and once they get on the slope, they kind of go out.”

Cuts in funding to federal agencies that assist with firefighting, as well as fire prevention and recovery, including the National Weather Service, the Forest Service, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will hinder response times and what the state and its partners can do when blazes break out.

“That impacts our ability to respond to our own state responsibility fires,” Chavez said. 

“There’s no doubt about it, especially when it comes to aircraft and crews, which is always the first thing you run out of,” he added.

Wade Crowfoot, the state’s secretary of natural resources, said he believes “it’s an objective fact that these cuts mean California will be less safe from wildfire.”

He said President Donald Trump, in his first term, erroneously blamed the state’s wildfires on state officials who, in Trump’s opinion, failed to adequately “rake” the forests.

“Fifty-seven percent of our forests are owned and managed by the federal government,” Crowfoot said, arguing that if anybody failed, it was the president.

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Over the past decade, the number of acres scorched by major wildfires has fluctuated sharply. In 2020, dry lightning ignited a wildfire outbreak in northern California that burned more than 4.3 million acres.

However, in 2022 and 2023, the total dropped to about 300,000 acres annually. On average, roughly 1.4 million acres burn each year.