Wildfire season is off to a historic start and it could get worse

By Kasha Patel, CNN

(CNN) — In southern Georgia, fast-moving flames destroyed a record number of homes; across the Plains in Nebraska, the largest fire in state history killed one person and wiped out more than 600,000 acres of cattle country; and outside Los Angeles, an unusually early blaze spurred evacuation alerts for thousands.

Wildfire season has been far from mild this spring.

Across the United States, wildfire activity has hit historic levels this spring and is likely to worsen in the coming months, experts say. Since the beginning of the year, nearly 30,000 fires have ignited across the country — the most in almost two decades. More than 2 million acres have burned, which is twice the previous 10-year average and the highest loss in 14 years.

The Southeast has tallied the highest number of fires across the country so far, with blazes closer to populated areas than usual. But the largest have occurred in the Great Plains, where strong winds pushed flames across towns. The West has already experienced uncharacteristically early and destructive events, bringing concerns for a perilous fire season.

“Here we are in May, and we’re talking about people losing their houses and lives,” said Morgan Varner, research director at Tall Timbers Research Station & Land Conservancy in Tallahassee, Florida. Several factors “all point to a really bad year” in many regions, he said.

That includes low snowpack, plenty of vegetation, drought and expected changes to weather patterns from a developing “Super” El Niño, all on top of an underlying warming climate that’s intensifying the hot, dry conditions that help fires ignite and spread.

Region by region, these are the most notable US wildfires so far and the biggest concerns heading into summer.

Dry conditions light up Southeast

Fires in Georgia are common from March to May, but this year is one for the history books.

Since the beginning of the year, more than 3,000 fires have burned 83,000 acres in the state, according to data from the Georgia Forestry Commission. That’s almost double the fires and eight times as many burned acres by this time of the year compared to the last five years.

“We’ve been in a drought, and it’s been building since late summer of 2025,” said Thomas Barrett, forest protection chief with the Georgia Forestry Commission. “It’s taken this long to finally get about as bad as it could get.”

On top of that, he said weather systems brought more dry air and strong winds to the region, creating a perfect storm of fire conditions this season. Forecasts from the National Interagency Fire Center expect high fire activity through July until summer thunderstorms bring relief.

“I keep my fingers crossed that we’re peaking about now, and that we’ll start going down in a couple of months,” said Barrett. “Everybody in the southeast part of the country has kind of been in the same shape this spring.”

Unlike previous years, the fires are also hitting closer to populated areas, particularly in Georgia.

April’s Highway 82 Fire, believed to have been sparked by a party balloon landing on a power line, destroyed more than 120 homes — the most destroyed by a fire since records began in the 1950s and likely in the state’s history, according to Barrett. Some fires sent smoke hundreds of miles away to Atlanta.

Just south, in Florida, fires burned tens of thousands of acres near Jacksonville and outside of the Miami metro, also sending smoke across communities that rarely see it.

“We’ve been in an area where wildfires are almost never seen,” said Varner. “We’re coughing on smoke while mowing the grass or looking at our azaleas.”

Most of this year’s wildfires so far have been in the southeastern states, particularly Georgia, Florida and North Carolina. The region has been experiencing an increase in wildfire activity in recent decades — largely due to changes in vegetation and climate, research shows.

As firefighters were busy battling the blazes, Varner said many states couldn’t perform their scheduled prescribed fires — a practice of burning built-up vegetation in controlled areas so they won’t fuel a wildfire.

In Florida, the number of executed prescribed fires is around the lowest in 25 years, he said. Across the Southeast, “almost every state is about halfway where they should be.”

“The problem is not just what happens during late May of this year or what happens in late summer,” he said. “It’s the rollover, that sort of carryover effect that would affect next year.”

Winds fan flames in the Plains

In less than a day on March 12, the Morrill Fire tore through 70 miles of prairie land in western Nebraska. It ran through the town of Oshkosh, where the fire department advised residents to turn on sprinklers until additional help arrived. Winds complicated containment and the fire eventually consumed 642,000 acres to become the state’s largest on record and the nation’s largest this year.

The Plains — specifically Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas and South Dakota — account for some of the most burned land this spring. Nebraska alone, which has experienced 25 wildfires so far, constituted about 40 percent of all burned wildland in the US as of May 21, per the National Interagency Fire Center.

Like the southeast, the Great Plains have been under intense drought for months and experienced strong winds and low humidity this season, which helped fan flames through tinder-dry grasslands.

Fires have been increasing in number and size in the Great Plains as warmer and drier conditions prevail. One study in 2017 found the total area burned has grown by 400 percent since around 1990s, accompanied by a higher number of fires each year as well.

Stronger fire season predicted in the West

Fire season doesn’t typically pick up until the summer and fall in the western US, but firefighters are already at work. It could just be the start of a devastating year, especially in California.

Off the coast of southern California, a wildfire has consumed more than 17,000 acres on Santa Rosa Island, which serves as a home to many rare plants and animals not found anywhere else in the world. Large fires in Riverside and Ventura counties also prompted evacuation alerts for tens of thousands of people.

“We had a pretty anomalous dry winter for most of the western US, and that’s what people are really worried about,” said Craig Clements, a professor of meteorology and director of the National Science Foundation’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center.

Historic heat in March melted snowpack to below normal levels across southern California, drying out vegetation sooner. River basins from the western coast to Colorado to the southwest are also less than 20 percent of normal, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Forecasters expect wildfire activity to be above average as summer progresses in California, the Southwest and Great Basin. April and May rain is adding more greenery that can serve as fire fuel. The developing El Niño may also bring more dry thunderstorms to the region — and more lightning to start the blazes.

“What I’m worried about is if we get extended heat wave followed by some dry lightning,” said Clements. “Everybody’s anticipating it, but it just depends on how weather plan pans out.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.