54,000 Wildfires Have Burned 8.5 Million Acres

By Douglas McIntyre  •  September 12, 2026
Christian Palau Pexels

It has been a record wildfire season so far. Over 54,000 fires have burned 8.5 million acres. Some of the largest fires have destroyed millions of dollars of property and driven people from their homes.

The causes of the fires cannot be fixed. They are drought and heat. So far this year, over 400 American towns and cities have posted all-time record-high temperatures. This has even been true in the northern tier of states, from South Dakota to New York City.

Drought, usually a major problem in the Southwest, has moved north to Oregon and East to Nebraska.

One of the biggest problems is the number of available firefighters. With a hundred fires burning at once, there are too few firefighters, and they’re spread too thin. Then the issue becomes where resources for and what the criteria for the decisions. Since there is no way to accurately predict which wildfires could be the worst, anticipating the use of firefighting resources becomes close to a guess.

Sometimes, fighting fires isn’t an issue. Fires in remote areas that are unlikely to be reached by people are sometimes left to burn. This is more the case in Canada than in the US. Some Canadian fires are so far north that the government ignores them

Another gating factor is wildfire smoke. Large fires in areas where winds push smoke east threaten cities as far north as Minneapolis and as far east as Washington. Earlier this year, Detroit had the worst air quality of any large city in the world. Research on the effects of wildfire smoke shows it carries toxins that can affect health for days, or even years. In areas with very heavy smoke, emergency room capacity also becomes a problem.

The question is: how does the number of wildfires drop? For now, the answer is that it won’t. That leaves the health and property damage issues as ones that are long term.

More from ClimateCrisis 247

Similar Posts