Wreckage from the 2023 wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii
Rick Bowmer/Associated Press/Alamy
Wildfires in the western US aren’t only growing bigger. They are also growing faster, putting millions of people and properties at greater risk.
“In the context of home destruction and lives lost, we really need to think more about fire speed than fire size,” says Jennifer Balch at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Rapidly spreading wildfires, such as the Camp Fire in California in 2021 and the Lahaina fire in Hawaii last year, are especially destructive, essentially becoming unstoppable because they move faster than firefighters can…
