In 2003, Dr. Ilkay Altintas, a computer scientist with the University of California, San Diego, had her first wildfire encounter. “It was like heaven and hell.”That year, fires tore through the San Diego region, leaving 16 people dead and 2,400 homes destroyed. One of the blazes, the Cedar fire, was at the time the largest in California history, burning more than 273,000 acres. Last year, five of the six largest fires in the state’s known history together chewed through nearly 2.5 million acres. The Cedar fire is now the state’s eighth-largest blaze, and the only one in the top 10 to have taken place before 2010.

Source: New York Times July 15, 2021 12:55 UTC