Last year, the deadliest wildfire season in state history swept across California. More than 8,000 fires burned nearly two million acres and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to suppress.* In a matter of minutes, a town named Paradise was engulfed in flame and almost completely destroyed; 85 people died.
The United States had been living in fear of such devastation since the early years of World War II when fire was seen as a weapon of war. And for almost as long, we’ve had Smokey Bear, sweetly but insistently reminding each of us of our role in protecting the country from this danger: “Remember—only you can prevent forest fires.”
In 1942, Japanese submarines shelled an oil field outside Santa Barbara, near the 2,700-square-mile Los Padres National Forest.