So record rain directly led to record fires. There’s a long history of this, verified by looking at tree rings, which inscribe both heavy rainfall and subsequent fire scars. The two go hand in hand. “A wet year reduces fires while increasing vegetation growth, but then the increased vegetation dries out in subsequent dry years, thereby increasing the fire fuel,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote. That’s hardly intuitive, but here again—calm plants the seeds of crazy.
