Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST: This year's fire season in Northern California is one of its worst. Over 200,000 acres burned, thousands of homes destroyed, more than 40 dead, and we're just at the start of the fall fire season. Michael Kodas wrote the book "Megafire: The Race To Extinguish A Deadly Epidemic of Flame." I ask him what factors are making these fires more destructive. MICHAEL KODAS: Well, in the case of this season, there's one thing that's kind of counterintuitive, which is the drought got eased in California and much of the West this year, and many people would think that that would lower the fire risk. But, in fact, California has had far more fires than it did a year ago. And that's due to the fact that when you get a pulse of moisture like we've seen in California, that can drive a big green-up of what firefighters call fine fuels, grasses and scrub and things that grow very quickly. And when it dries back out, they can have four, five
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