Authorities battled a new round of dangerous wildfires along Chile’s Pacific coast on Wednesday evening, just weeks after blazes there killed more than 100 people.

Chile’s national disaster agency said Wednesday evening that several communities in the Valparaíso region were being evacuated as emergency services battled the Cerro Cordillera fire. That part of the coast is dotted with towns that rise steeply from the ocean.

Devastating wildfires swept through the region last month after breaking out in Viña del Mar, a coastal town about 80 miles (130 kilometers) by road northwest of Santiago, the capital. They destroyed entire neighborhoods, kept people fleeing in cars and destroyed thousands of homes. President Gabriel Boric called it Chile’s worst disaster since a cataclysmic earthquake in 2010 killed more than 400 people and displaced another 1.5 million.

This is a development story.

The Kremlin has fired its top naval commander in the biggest fallout yet from a series of devastating attacks by Ukraine on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, a Ukrainian and a Western official said.

Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov, head of the Russian Navy for the past five years, was relieved of his command and replaced by the head of Russia’s Northern Fleet.

Russian publications reported on Sunday, based on anonymous sources, that Admiral Yevmenov had been fired. The Financial Times quotes Ukrainian officials: reported the development on Monday. However, the Russian government has refused to confirm the personnel changes.

U.S. officials have concluded that while Kiev’s counteroffensive last year in eastern and southern Ukraine largely failed, its attacks on the Crimean Peninsula and attacks on the Black Sea Fleet were unexpectedly effective.

The victories are all the more surprising because Ukraine does not have a traditional navy or fleet of warships. Instead, Ukraine has used naval drones and missiles to attack Russian ships.

U.S. officials believe Ukraine has sunk 15 Russian ships in the past six months. European officials have said the naval victories have reopened the western Black Sea, allowing Ukraine to once again ship grain from Odesa.

A Ukrainian military intelligence official said the removal of Admiral Yevmenov from command was directly related to the loss of Russian ships.

Ukraine estimates that a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which once numbered 80 ships, has been destroyed since the war began two years ago. The sinking of the Moskva, Russia’s flagship, in April 2022 with a Ukrainian-built missile was one of Kiev’s great symbolic victories.

But the more recent campaign has been just as important for practical gains. As a result of the attacks, Russia has withdrawn its fleet from the Ukrainian coast and the western Black Sea.

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said on Tuesday that the Ukrainian army had “effectively won the war for control of the western half of the Black Sea.”

“And Ukrainian grain is now flowing again through the Bosphorus to Africa and China, which are Ukraine’s traditional markets,” Mr. Sikorski told reporters in Washington at a breakfast hosted by The Christian Science Monitor.

At a Senate hearing on Monday, CIA Director William J. Burns said Ukraine could carry out more attacks against Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet if the United States provided additional military assistance.

“Ukraine can continue to exact costs against Russia, not only with deep penetration attacks on Crimea, but also against its Black Sea Fleet, and can continue this success, which has resulted in the sinking of fifteen Russian ships over the course of the past six months.” Mr. Burns, who wrote in an article this year that Ukraine should redouble such tactics.

Ukrainian military analysts said the decision to replace the top naval commander made sense as Russian efforts to defend its fleet from attack have failed.

“What have the Russians done to increase the effectiveness of countering our attacks?” Oleksandr Kovalenko, a military analyst, told Ukrainian news media. “Nothing. They currently have no effective solution to increase the security of their warships. The only viable solution they could implement was flights from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk.”

Russian publications have reported that Admiral Yevmenov will be replaced by the head of the Russian Northern Fleet, Admiral Aleksandr A. Moiseyev. However, Admiral Yevmenov is still listed as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy on the Russian Army’s official website.

“There are decrees that are classified as secret,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry S. Peskov told reporters on Monday. “I can’t comment on them. No public decrees have been published on this matter.”

Instead, the Russian military has made statements about naval operations, including a statement on Tuesday about Russian naval vessels taking part in joint exercises with Iran and China in the Gulf of Oman.

It is not the first time that questions about the leadership of the Russian Navy have gone unanswered in public.

In February, Russian Telegram channels that track the country’s military reported that the top officer of the Black Sea Fleet had been removed, but he is still listed as the fleet’s commander on the Russian military’s website.

Last year, Ukrainian authorities claimed to have killed the same commander, but Russia quickly distributed images of him giving an interview to prove he was alive.

By this time of year, rain should drench large areas of the Amazon rainforest. Instead, a punishing drought has kept the rain at bay, creating dry conditions for fires that have engulfed hundreds of square miles of rainforest that normally doesn’t burn.

The fires have turned the end of the dry season in the northern part of the giant rainforest into a crisis. Firefighters have struggled to control massive blazes that have sent choking smoke to cities across South America.

A record number of fires so far this year in the Amazon has also raised questions about what awaits the world’s largest tropical rainforest when the dry season begins in June in the much larger southern part of the jungle.

Last month, Venezuela, northern Brazil, Guyana and Suriname, which cover large parts of the northern Amazon, recorded the highest number of fires in February that year, according to US State Department figures. The Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, which has been monitoring fires in the rainforest for 25 years. Fires were also burning in Colombia’s Andean highlands, as well as in parts of that country’s Amazon region.

The fires in the Amazon, which extend into nine South American countries, are the result of an extreme drought fueled by climate change, experts say.

The region is feeling the effects of a natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño, which could worsen dry conditions, which have been exacerbated by extremely high temperatures this year.

That has made the rainforest more vulnerable to fast-spreading fires, said Ane Alencar, scientific director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Brazil.

“The climate is making South America’s forests more flammable,” she said. “It creates opportunities for forest fires.”

As countries continue to burn fossil fuels and the planet reaches the highest average temperatures recorded by scientists, a grueling year of fires is expected around the world. Severe fires have already ravaged large parts of the United States and Australia, and a worse season is forecast for Canada, where more hectares burned last year than ever before.

Another year of devastating fires could be especially damaging in the Amazon, where large amounts of carbon dioxide are stored in trees and soil. It is also home to 10 percent of the plants, animals and other living organisms on our planet.

If deforestation, fires and climate change continue to worsen, large areas of forest could turn into grasslands or weakened ecosystems in the coming decades. That would trigger a collapse that could release up to 20 years’ worth of global carbon emissions into the atmosphere, scientists say, in a huge blow to the fight to curb climate change.

Once this tipping point is crossed, “it may be futile to try to do anything,” says Bernardo Flores, who studies ecosystem resilience at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.

In January, wildfires burned nearly 4,000 square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon, a nearly fourfold increase from the same month last year, according to Map biomesa collective of climate-focused nonprofits and research institutions.

In February, more than two-thirds of Brazil’s fires took place in Roraima, the country’s northernmost state. They have burned down homes and subsistence crops in several indigenous villages, creating a thick haze over rural areas and dangerous air quality in the state capital, Boa Vista.

As a result of the prolonged drought, vegetation in this part of the Amazon has become “flammable,” explained Dr. Alencar out. “Roraima looks like a barrel of gunpowder right now.”

Researchers say most of the fires sweeping through the region were initially started by farmers using the slash and burn method to grow new grass on degraded pastures or completely deforest recently deforested land.

Fueled by dry conditions and high temperatures, many of these fires grow out of control and spread miles beyond the area originally burned.

“Fires are contagious,” said Dr. Flores. “They change the ecosystem they pass through and increase the risk to adjacent areas, just like a virus.”

In Roraima, the fires have mainly burned areas within the Lavrado, a unique savannah-like region nestled in the Amazon, said Erika Berenguer, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford and the University of Lancaster.

This ecosystem, known for its wide-open grasslands and a rare population of wild horses, overlaps with several protected areas, including the indigenous Yanomami Reserve, where illegal mining and forest destruction have led to a humanitarian crisis.

After months of scant rainfall, the dense rainforest, which is usually too humid to catch fire, has also become more susceptible to flames.

In Roraima, the fires have now spread to protected forests and indigenous areas in the southern region of the state, according to Haron Xaud, professor at the Federal University of Roraima and researcher at Embrapa Roraima, an institute monitoring the fires.

While fires are common in the drier boreal forests of Canada and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, they do not occur naturally in the much wetter Amazon rainforest. Tropical forests are not adapted to fires, Dr.

Some of the Amazon’s human-caused wildfires have become ‘megafires’ typically defined as fires that burn more than 100,000 hectares of land or that have an unusually significant effect on people and the environment. These types of fires, Dr. Flores said, will become more common as the planet warms and deforestation damages the Amazon’s ability to recover.

Environmental factors are already changing the Amazon. Dry seasons are getting longer and average rainfall during those periods, when rain decreases but does not stop completely, has already fallen by a third since the 1970s, Dr Berenguer said. That has made El Niños increasingly dangerous.

“If you put all these factors together, you have the conditions for a perfect storm – the perfect firestorm,” said Dr. Berenguer.

The fires in the Amazon have had a striking effect on CO2 emissions. In February, forest fires in Brazil and Venezuela emitted almost 10 million tons of carbon, the most ever recorded in the month and about as much as Switzerland emits in a year, according to European Commission data. Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

The El Niño pattern should subside within a few months, bringing some calm to the Amazon.

But more devastating fires could break out if the parched ground does not receive enough rain in the crucial wetter months ahead, Dr Alencar said.

“The question is whether the forest can recover before the dry season, and whether the Amazon can recharge its batteries,” she said. “Now it all depends on the rain.”

Simon Posada contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.

By this time of year, rain should drench large areas of the Amazon rainforest. Instead, a punishing drought has kept the rain at bay, creating dry conditions for fires that have engulfed hundreds of square miles of rainforest that normally doesn’t burn.

The fires have turned the end of the dry season in the northern part of the giant rainforest into a crisis. Firefighters have struggled to control massive blazes that have sent choking smoke to cities across South America.

A record number of fires so far this year in the Amazon has also raised questions about what awaits the world’s largest tropical rainforest when the dry season begins in June in the much larger southern part of the jungle.

Last month, Venezuela, northern Brazil, Guyana and Suriname, which cover large parts of the northern Amazon, recorded the highest number of fires in February that year, according to US State Department figures. The Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, which has been monitoring fires in the rainforest for 25 years. Fires were also burning in Colombia’s Andean highlands, as well as in parts of that country’s Amazon region.

The fires in the Amazon, which extend into nine South American countries, are the result of an extreme drought fueled by climate change, experts say.

The region is feeling the effects of a natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño, which could worsen dry conditions, which have been exacerbated by extremely high temperatures this year.

That has made the rainforest more vulnerable to fast-spreading fires, said Ane Alencar, scientific director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Brazil.

“The climate is making South America’s forests more flammable,” she said. “It creates opportunities for forest fires.”

As countries continue to burn fossil fuels and the planet reaches the highest average temperatures recorded by scientists, a grueling year of fires is expected around the world. Severe fires have already ravaged large parts of the United States and Australia, and a worse season is forecast for Canada, where more hectares burned last year than ever before.

Another year of devastating fires could be especially damaging in the Amazon, where large amounts of carbon dioxide are stored in trees and soil. It is also home to 10 percent of the plants, animals and other living organisms on our planet.

If deforestation, fires and climate change continue to worsen, large areas of forest could turn into grasslands or weakened ecosystems in the coming decades. That would trigger a collapse that could release up to 20 years’ worth of global carbon emissions into the atmosphere, scientists say, in a huge blow to the fight to curb climate change.

Once this tipping point is crossed, “it may be futile to try to do anything,” says Bernardo Flores, who studies ecosystem resilience at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.

In January, wildfires burned nearly 4,000 square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon, a nearly fourfold increase from the same month last year, according to Map biomesa collective of climate-focused nonprofits and research institutions.

In February, more than two-thirds of Brazil’s fires took place in Roraima, the country’s northernmost state. They have burned down homes and subsistence crops in several indigenous villages, creating a thick haze over rural areas and dangerous air quality in the state capital, Boa Vista.

As a result of the prolonged drought, vegetation in this part of the Amazon has become “flammable,” explained Dr. Alencar out. “Roraima looks like a barrel of gunpowder right now.”

Researchers say most of the fires sweeping through the region were initially started by farmers using the slash and burn method to grow new grass on degraded pastures or completely deforest recently deforested land.

Fueled by dry conditions and high temperatures, many of these fires grow out of control and spread miles beyond the area originally burned.

“Fires are contagious,” said Dr. Flores. “They change the ecosystem they pass through and increase the risk to adjacent areas, just like a virus.”

In Roraima, the fires have mainly burned areas within the Lavrado, a unique savannah-like region nestled in the Amazon, said Erika Berenguer, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford and the University of Lancaster.

This ecosystem, known for its wide-open grasslands and a rare population of wild horses, overlaps with several protected areas, including the indigenous Yanomami Reserve, where illegal mining and forest destruction have led to a humanitarian crisis.

After months of scant rainfall, the dense rainforest, which is usually too humid to catch fire, has also become more susceptible to flames.

In Roraima, the fires have now spread to protected forests and indigenous areas in the southern region of the state, according to Haron Xaud, professor at the Federal University of Roraima and researcher at Embrapa Roraima, an institute monitoring the fires.

While fires are common in the drier boreal forests of Canada and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, they do not occur naturally in the much wetter Amazon rainforest. Tropical forests are not adapted to fires, Dr.

Some of the Amazon’s human-caused wildfires have become ‘megafires’ typically defined as fires that burn more than 100,000 hectares of land or that have an unusually significant effect on people and the environment. These types of fires, Dr. Flores said, will become more common as the planet warms and deforestation damages the Amazon’s ability to recover.

Environmental factors are already changing the Amazon. Dry seasons are getting longer and average rainfall during those periods, when rain decreases but does not stop completely, has already fallen by a third since the 1970s, Dr Berenguer said. That has made El Niños increasingly dangerous.

“If you put all these factors together, you have the conditions for a perfect storm – the perfect firestorm,” said Dr. Berenguer.

The fires in the Amazon have had a striking effect on CO2 emissions. In February, forest fires in Brazil and Venezuela emitted almost 10 million tons of carbon, the most ever recorded in the month and about as much as Switzerland emits in a year, according to European Commission data. Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

The El Niño pattern should subside within a few months, bringing some calm to the Amazon.

But more devastating fires could break out if the parched ground does not receive enough rain in the crucial wetter months ahead, Dr Alencar said.

“The question is whether the forest can recover before the dry season, and whether the Amazon can recharge its batteries,” she said. “Now it all depends on the rain.”

Simon Posada contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.

Mickey German has lived in Fritch, Texas most of his life, but Fritch hasn’t always made it easy.

He recalls watching from the safety of a bar, The Renegade, in 1992 as a storm brought a group of tornadoes through Fritch, leveling his apartment and 200 other homes. Then, in the spring of 2014, a fire that locals call the Mother’s Day Fire burned another 225 people.

Now a new disaster has devastated Fritch, a close-knit town of about 1,900 residents, and left 54-year-old Mr. German homeless again. His apartment was one of dozens consumed by flames last week during one of several active wildfires that have burned a total of 1.2 million acres in the Texas Panhandle.

“It was in smoke,” Mr. German, a maintenance worker at a gas station, said Tuesday as he stood outside his temporary residence at the Lone Star Motel. “This one hurt.”

The population here has been steadily declining for decades, and after this latest catastrophe, residents are wondering which of their neighbors will be the next to pack up and leave. Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, the city lost 12 percent of its residents. Yet many are drawn to stay because they want to live somewhere where everyone knows everyone and where persevering despite setbacks is seen as a sign of achievement.

“I know there’s a few I’ve talked to who say, ‘I’m done,’ but I’m not going anywhere,” Mr. German said as he smoked a cigarette near his truck, one of the few assets he could have . to save from the fire. “I won’t let it pass me by. Not a chance in hell. It’s home.”

Mr. German and other longtime residents said last week’s fire had burned some of the same land that was hit by the tornadoes in ’92.

The latest tragedy to befall Fritch was compounded Tuesday by the death of the city’s volunteer fire chief, Zeb Smith, who collapsed shortly after dawn while responding to a house fire in the city. Mr. Smith, 40, had entered the cream-colored one-story house because it was full of smoke, authorities said, and had to be pulled away by other firefighters. He couldn’t be saved.

At an emotional news conference, officials said Mr Smith and his crew had worked long days and nights last week battling the bushfires, only to have to deal with an unrelated blaze in the heart of their city.

“To me, he was one of my children,” Fritch Mayor Tom Ray said as he fought back tears.

Residents lined Fritch’s main thoroughfare, Broadway Street, to pay their respects as an array of fire trucks, police cars and motorcycles escorted a silver hearse. The flags in the city flew at half-mast.

Melony Watkins, 52, an artist, lives with her husband a block away from the house that caught fire and said she watched from her porch as the flames burned out the windows and doors. Ms. Watkins has lived in the city since fourth grade and describes herself as “a die-hard Fritchian,” but said she felt overwhelmed by what felt like one disaster after another.

“I just want to escape,” she said. “It’s just like any crazy day; I wake up almost before I even get my coffee and see what kind of roast is happening today.

Ms Watkins praised the generosity of many local residents who have offered food, extra bedrooms and farm supplies to those feeling burned out, but said she still expected some people would eventually leave. There is very little temporary housing, and some people whose homes burned may not be able to rebuild because, like many people in rural Texas, they didn’t have homeowners insurance.

The fire that struck Fritch, known as the Windy Deuce fire, was one of several fast-moving fires that started last week.

The largest fire by far is the Smokehouse Creek fire, which became the state’s largest fire in history and resulted in two deaths. A landowner lawsuit claims the fire was started by a downed utility pole, although the state has not yet drawn any conclusions about how the fire started. Thousands of cattle are feared dead, and large swaths of land have been charred, in a blow to ranchers and farmers who form the economic backbone of the region.

The fires have been unusually powerful, partly because of a combination of high winds and miles of dried-out grass that can ignite almost instantly, fire officials say.

“I’ve fought fire from Florida to California, from New Mexico to Montana, and the fire behavior we’re seeing in the Panhandle is by far the most extreme fire behavior I’ve ever seen,” said Colten Ledbetter, 32, a hood captain with the Southern Plains Fire Group that has been fighting the fires for the past week.

When the fire hit Fritch on the afternoon of February 27, the fire was moving so quickly that firefighters were unable to save homes. Some people saw the homes of friends and relatives in ruins, along with their own.

Wanda Buchanan, a teacher, has lived in the same house on the Chisholm Trail, a road overlooking large fields on the southern edge of the city, for 49 years. On Tuesday, she examined what was left: a pile of ash, fallen rocks and the twisted remains of the metal roof.

Her son’s house was also destroyed, and not far away the house of one of her grandsons.

Ms. Buchanan, 74, was working as a substitute teacher in Amarillo that day and could not return in time to save her most valuable possessions. Chief among these were her mother’s cookbook, her diplomas, the license from her marriage to her late husband, and a plethora of old home movies.

“Things like that you never get back,” she said. “I try not to think about the past and what I’ve lost.”

About the only thing she could find in the ashes Tuesday afternoon was a charred hammer, a metal shovel and the outline of her stove. There were no seats left on the swing in the garden, only metal chains dangling in the wind.

She admits that Fritch is once again faced with a difficult situation. But she said that after teaching at the city school for 26 years, she knows several generations of some families and understands how resilient they are.

And she knows there are many reasons to stay in Fritch: the weather that changes every season, the way everyone comes to support the youth sports teams, all the shared memories of a city with a long history, even if it was a difficult one. .

“It survived the other fires, it survived the tornado, it’s going to be fine,” she said. “We will probably only be stronger.”

Canada’s emergency preparedness minister is warning that this year’s wildfire season will be worse than the record-breaking season of 2023, when thousands of fires burned tens of millions of hectares and sent huge plumes of smoke that enveloped major U.S. cities, including New York and New York. Washington.

This year’s fires could be especially intense in two of the country’s most fire-prone provinces, where nearly 150 of the fires that started during last year’s season are still burning this winter, under snow-covered ground.

Although so-called “zombie fires,” a term recently popularized in Canadian media, are an annual phenomenon in parts of the country, never before have so many fires been reported in a single winter, raising fears that many of them will flare up again . above ground.

The ‘zombie fires’ persist in winter because porous ground cover of peat and moss in northern areas acts as underground fuel for these fires.

The risk of wildfires in Canada has increased due to climate change, increasing the hot, dry and windy conditions that have caused droughts, according to research published last summer by World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists who model how climate change can cause extreme weather influences. .

Given drought conditions in parts of Western Canada and other extreme weather impacts, Harjit Sajjan, Canada’s emergency preparedness minister, said it was not surprising that the wildfire forecast was “alarming.”

He added that climate change “is the reality we face and we must prepare for it.”

Many of the underground fires — burning in the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta — do not pose an increased risk of causing spring wildfires because they are so charred in places that there is no vegetation left to burn.

But others are in areas where drought has turned into tinderboxes, raising fears that fires will break out above ground once spring arrives.

Last year’s wildfires burned about 48 million hectares of forest across Canada, an area about the size of Finland, and a staggering 170 percent increase from the previous year, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.

Smoke from the fires, especially those burning in Quebec, drifted as far south as Florida, blanketing several cities in the United States and southern Canada with a noxious cloud.

Now entering its third year, the drought in Western Canada is a major factor behind fears of an even worse fire season in 2024, especially in British Columbia and Alberta.

Both provinces have already seen new above-ground wildfires this year, prompting Alberta to declare the start of wildfire season about a week before the traditional start date of March 1.

Snow could still fall in the spring and tame existing fires and help with dry conditions, said Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildfire science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia.

But this year, he added, long-term forecasts indicate continued drought and warmer-than-normal temperatures.

About 93 fires left over from last year have continued to burn underground throughout the winter in British Columbia, while 55 are burning in Alberta, according to their provincial governments.

Such winter fires are common in both provinces, as well as in Yukon, but in British Columbia there are usually no more than about 15, experts said, adding that the much higher number this year has left them surprised and concerned.

“There is no historical analogy to what we see now,” Professor Flannigan said. “Most years they’re not that bad. But now many of these fires have the potential that when the snow melts and it becomes warm, dry and windy, they could start growing again. So it is a serious problem.”

No winter fires have been recorded in the forests of Quebec, the eastern province that sent smoke to the United States and at one point across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. Quebec generally lacks the peat and moss soils of the western provinces that serve as fuel for winter fires.

Because winter fires occur underground and may produce little or no visible smoke, detecting them can be challenging. The wildfire agency for British Columbia said it relied on sensors on planes and satellites to search for heat, although snow cover reduces its effectiveness.

Still, some fires have been visible to the naked eye.

“Even on days of -40 to -42 degrees Celsius we still saw smoke,” says Sonja ER Leverkus, chief fire brigade at Northern Fire Worx, a private wildfire suppression service in a remote part of northeastern British Columbia. “So bad that you could smell the smoke and cough in your truck while driving.”

In a normal year, melting snow seeps into the ground, where winter fires burn and most of them are extinguished. But this year there has been much less snow than usual, says Dr. Leverkus, who has a PhD in fire ecology.

“I’m 6 feet tall, and there have been times in recent years when the snow on my apple orchard was well above my hips,” she said, adding that there was less than a foot on the ground.

Mr. Sajjan, the minister of emergency preparedness, said Canada was better prepared this year to fight fires and evacuate communities. While provinces and territories are responsible for fighting fires, federal money has provided training for another 600 firefighters across the country.

A system meant to allow provinces to share staff and equipment has been revamped to make it more efficient and speed up the exchange of information, Mr Sajjan said.

Equipment stocks have been increased, he added, and new techniques and technologies – including nighttime firefighting – are being introduced or tested.

While the forecast for this year’s bushfire season appears bleak, Professor Flannigan stressed it was still just a prediction.

“I don’t expect to see another year like 2023 in my lifetime, but I could be wrong,” he said.

Still, he added that the long-term prospects for Canada were discouraging.

“Pretty much every year is going to be a bad fire year,” Professor Flannigan said. “But on average we will see a lot more fire and a lot more smoke. This trend will continue.”

In Fort Nelson, British Columbia, Dr. Leverkus, with a crew of more than 100 at the height of fire season, said they were still haunted by the eight firefighter deaths in Canada last year. Two of them occurred in areas near where her crews worked.

“Last year was terrible,” she says. “My crew and I are listening to what the land is telling us. And the land tells us it’s dry, and the animals tell us it’s dry and to be ready.”

Vjosa Isai research contributed.