California Facing Extreme Heat Wave Amid Wildfires

California is in the midst of a scorching late-summer heat wave that threatens to worsen wildfire conditions, while several wildfires have broken out this week, prompting multiple evacuation efforts across the state.

The National Weather Service (NWS) said in a statement Thursday that there will be “Nothing but heat for the next three days,” and warned that many areas will see even hotter temperatures on Friday.

“The hot temperatures lived up to their billing today and then some as light offshore flow in the morning combined with extremely hot temperatures aloft to roast most of southern California in triple-digit heat,” the NWS said in an update on Thursday at 2:12 p.m. PST. “Only the immediate coastal areas were spared the extreme heat, though even there, temperatures were 5-10 degrees above normal.”

Most Californians are under some level of heat advisory, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Temperatures are expected to peak for most of the state on Friday, with many areas breaching 100°F. Some areas, like Coachella Valley, have already reached temperatures close to 120°F, on par with Death Valley — one of the hottest places on Earth. 

David Eisenman, professor of medicine and public health at UCLA and co-director of the Center for Healthy Climate Solutions, told the Los Angeles Times that with such extreme temperatures, it’s important to stay cool, drink water or visit a cool place, like a cooling center or library.

“We know that extreme heat causes more deaths than any other natural disaster,” he said. “The problem is we don’t look at [heat events] in the same sort of frightened way. We’ve also been slow as a nation to take extreme heat seriously as a disaster,” 

The NWS said in an update Friday morning that “Dangerously hot conditions are possible away from the coast, especially in the mountain and foothill locations where overnight low temperatures will cool little from daytime highs.”

As for the state’s raging wildfires, Cal Fire on Thursday reported the state’s ninth wildfire emergency incident in three days, the most devastating of which being the Boone Fire, which broke out on Tuesday and has burned more than 16,000 acres. It is only 5% contained as of Friday. The cause of the fires is still undetermined.

In Los Angeles, the city has set up at least five cooling centers this week amid the hottest temperatures the city has seen since 2020. Los Angeles and large parts of southern California are under “extreme” heat risk, according to the NWS.

UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain told The Associated Press that there’s an “extreme contrast” between people who live close to the sea versus people living farther from the coast. “It’s these inland areas where we see people who… are killed by this extreme heat or whose lives are at least made miserable.”

Swain also hinted toward an aspect of climate injustice in regard to the rise in extreme temperatures. California is “becoming more expensive, more exclusive in the places that are least likely to experience extreme heat,” he said. “The people who are most at risk of extreme heat” — those with limited financial resources — “are precisely the people experiencing extreme heat.”

The NWS said that weather models point to slight cooling onshore winds on Saturday, but added that “all this will likely do is lower temps from ridiculously hot to extremely hot, or roughly 1-4 degrees of cooling.” Through the weekend, daytime temperatures are expected to remain about 10-15 degrees above normal, with the nights to be “extremely warm.”

“Hot conditions will linger into early next week, then a cooling trend will develop as an upper-level trough will dig into the Pacific Northwest,” The NWS said on Friday. Temperatures are expected to return to “near-normal” by Wednesday.