Fire officials knew this would be a bad fire season, thanks in large part to the long drought. But this bad? The state is already about 1,500 fires ahead of the typical fire season, and the Santa Ana winds haven't even started yet.
If Gov. Jerry Brown is right, this week's firestorms were not an aberration. "This is the future from now on," Brown said a press briefing Monday about the mega-fires still tearing through semi-rural parts of Northern California that have chewed through 141,000 acres and destroyed more than 800 homes so far. "It's going to get worse just by the nature of the way the climate is changing.