The hundreds of wildland fires that have blazed across the United States landscape in recent years mark the confluence of weather past and present. With much of the West and Southern Plains still in varying degrees of drought, the fire season has started early, burned stronger, and lasted longer than in some previous seasons. But wildland fires are nothing new, and they have left scars across the forests, scrublands, and grasslands of America and the world for millennia. But their impacts have become greater as the growth of urban and suburban footprints bump up against wildland, resulting in costlier and more devastating conflagrations. And in nearly every case, the weather has played a significant role in the cause, the spread of these fires, or in the efforts to fight them. Estimates are that there are approximately 70,000 communities nationwide that are at risk from wildfires.
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