State Sen. Mike McGuire’s legislation confronting California’s increasing wildfire risk by establishing new safety standards for developments in high risk wildfire areas passed overwhelmingly in the Senate’s Governance and Finance Committee on Thursday.
The 2020 wildfire season burned more than 4.2 million acres, making it by far the largest in the history of California.
Eight out of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the past 10 years, including the August Complex fire, which burned more than one million acres in the fall of 2020, making it the state’s first “gigafire” – a term for a fire that burns at least one million acres of land.
And in each of these major fires, tens of thousands of Californians ran for their lives, sometimes in the dark of night with just the clothes on their back, scrambling to find any way to escape the roaring flames.