The 2024 wildfire season in the United States was characterized by continued growth of extensive fire activity and costs.

With 40,401 wildfires burning 9.4 million acres, an area 12 times the size of Yosemite, burned land marked a 40% increase from a decade ago and a fourfold rise over 40 years. Along with these trends, suppression costs soared to $4.7 billion, a 250% increase over the past decade, highlighting the growing complexity and expense of firefighting efforts.

Large fires drove cost and acreage burned

1,937 large fires (>100 acres) were responsible for over 98% of the total acres burned and total suppression costs, and 39 megafires (> 40,000 acres) accounted for 56% of all acres burned, demonstrating the outsized impact of these massive fires.

2024 Megafires

SPOTLIGHT: MEGAFIRES

An up-close look at the most prominent mega fires of 2024.

Smoke crosses a road the afternoon of February 29, 2024. Photo: Unknown // Inciweb

Smokehouse Creek & Windy Deuce Fires, Texas

The Smokehouse Creek Fire was the largest of the year, burning over 1 million acres and becoming Texas’s largest wildfire in history. Together with the Windy Deuce Fire, these blazes destroyed 130 homes, claimed two lives, and caused an estimated $4.5 billion in long-term economic damages.

The suspected cause was downed power lines from a broken utility pole, allegedly due to inadequate maintenance. The fires were fueled by a perfect storm of extreme conditions, including gusting winds up to 50 mph, exceptionally low humidity (5-10%), and  prolonged drought.

Smoke plume of the Park Fire in Butte County as seen from the CARD Wildwood Park on the afternoon of July 25, 2024. Photo: Frank Schulenburg / Wikimedia.

Park Fire, California

Burning 430K acres, the Park Fire in NoCal was the second-largest wildfire of the year and the most expensive, costing $350 million. The fire grew explosively to roughly 45K acres within hours and over 350K acres in three days. 

It destroyed 636 structures and forced thousands to evacuate, occurring just miles from the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, the deadliest in state history. 

The fire was sparked by alleged arson involving a burning car and driven by extreme climate featuring very low humidity, strong winds, and dry vegetation – July was California’s hottest month on record, with temperatures often reaching 100 to 110 degrees.

Park Fire Timelapse, Day 1 → Day 17

View Park Fire →

By Marcus Johnson, Vale District of the Bureau of Land Management – Durkee Fire on InciWeb, Public Domain, Link

Durkee Fire, Oregon

The Durkee Fire in Oregon rounds out the top three largest fires of the year.  Sparked by lightning in mid-July, the fire burned nearly 300K acres and produced pyrocumulonimbus clouds, creating its own weather system and complicating firefighting efforts. 

The fire’s rapid growth was driven by the same extreme weather as the Park Fire, including record-setting high temperatures, extremely dry fuels, and gusting high winds. Oregon saw 12 of the nation’s 39 megafires this year, all in this time span, costing $480M and burning 1.6M acres in total.

View Durkee Fire →

Megafire activity followed extreme climate

Wildfire activity in 2024 followed a strikingly regional progression, driven by prevailing weather and seasonal conditions.

Early in the year, grass-fueled megafires broke out in Texas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska due to extreme winds and low humidity in the Great Plains region. By June, activity shifted to Alaska, where fires, although vast, posed minimal risk due to the state’s low population density and ability to let fires burn out.

In July, fire activity intensified across the West and Northwest, with megafires igniting in Oregon, Washington, California, and Idaho due to a much hotter-than-normal summer and an abundance of fine fuels left behind by an unusually wet winter and spring.  Late August and September saw the summer followed by heatwaves across the region, leading to five megafires in Wyoming, two in SoCal and others in Idaho and Oregon.

Wyoming, typically less affected, saw grassland fires driven by strong winds and dry fuels. The fire season extended into December again this year with the Franklin Fire in Malibu burning over 4000 acres and causing over 20,000 residents to evacuate. These five states accounted for 78% of all acres burned nationwide, totaling 6.6 million acres.

In a rare shift, the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions experienced heightened wildfire activity in October due to severe drought. New Jersey reported over 300 wildfires this fall, a tenfold increase, and Connecticut saw over 150 fires, after just five the previous year.

Improved land management is critical for prevention

The statistics for 2024 are emblematic of an era in which wildfires are more severe and expensive than ever. They highlight the need for adaptive strategies, from enhanced suppression techniques to proactive land management to infrastructure hardening along with community education and preparedness.  Returning to a regimen of restorative land management policies is critical, including a reversal of total fire suppression policies, the use of prescribed fire, mechanical thinning, and other fuel management activities.  These practices reduce wildfire risk by removing fuels on the ground, enhance forest health by favoring fire-resistant trees and fire-adapted flora and fauna, and mitigate climate change.

Prescribed burn acreage has doubled over the past five years according to NIFC’s data, a promising trend.

The Southeast is a leader in this effort, with Florida and Georgia collectively conducting prescribed burns on 4M acres in 2024 while limiting wildfire losses to just 48K acres.

By contrast, California reported only 155K acres of prescribed burns in 2023, according to the state’s Prescribed Fire Incident Reporting System (PFIRS). 

Comparative Burn Study

While California faces bigger hurdles in burn execution because of its long history of total fire suppression, more complex terrain, and regulatory and operational requirements, this disparity highlights both the feasibility and the efficacy of a strong prescribed burn program.  

Notably, prescribed burn and land management reporting remains fragmented and incomplete, leaving many burns unaccounted for.  California does not provide agricultural and land clearing data.  Although this is presumably a smaller percentage of burns, it underscores the need for better data and planning. <Community awareness and data transparency> Scaling up these practices is vital to building wildfire resilience and protecting communities in the face of a changing climate.

The 2025 fire season has already begun

2025 began with the devastating Palisades, Eaton and Hurst fires in Southern California.

As of mid-January, red flag warnings continue to be in effect for much of the region due to strong Santa Ana winds, warmer than average weather, low relative humidity and moderate to severe drought in the region. 

Palisades, Before & After

North of Palisades, Before & After

Imagery: Sentinel-2 via Skywatch

The fire season is expected to continue with a transition from El Niño to La Niña conditions, expected early this year, typically leading to more storms in the northern US and warmer and drier conditions in the southern US.

The 2025 outlook indicates another year of extreme wildfire activity.  As the season begins, the urgency for transformative wildfire management solutions has never been greater. From scaling up land management to infrastructure preparedness to leveraging advanced technology, the path forward demands bold action to safeguard lives, property, and natural landscapes against an increasingly volatile future.

Citations

• NIFC Open Data
  https://data-nifc.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/nifc::current-wildland-fire-incident-locations/about
• FOX NEWS // Texas Wildfire Turns Deadly
  https://www.foxweather.com/weather-news/deadly-texas-wildfires-smokehouse-creek-windy-deuce
• Wikipedia // Smokehouse Fire
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokehouse_Creek_Fire

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/state/2024/03/18/smokehouse-creek-fire-update-texas-wildfires-map-containment-panhandle/73014416007/

https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2024

https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2024/7/24/park-fire/updates/49c10254-23c0-41f6-bc49-6202eac4d007 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Fire

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/07/25/eastern-oregon-durkee-fire-largest-nation-keeps-growing/ 

https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/baker-city/97814/july-weather/335251?year=2024 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oregon-durkee-fire-created-its-own-weather-noaa-wildfires-climate/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Fire 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/08/nyregion/wildfires-drought-new-jersey-connecticut.html 

https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-united-states-of-fire/