California wildfires burning bigger as season begins

Frequency greater than last year as emergency alerts light up residents' phones.

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The Point fire started Sunday in Sonoma County, Calif., just north of San Francisco. Photo: Anna McPeck via X.

Not a day has gone by in the past two weeks when my phone didn’t light up with the latest alerts about wildfires near my home in Northern California, including this past weekend.

A fast-moving fire near Healdsburg, Calif., dubbed the Point fire, went from a handful of acres to more than a thousand on Sunday in just a few hours, with smaller vegetation fires around town distracting firefighters from the larger battle. A much larger fire in Southern California, about 45 miles from Los Angeles, meanwhile, was forcing evacuations of a local campground and popular lake resort.

Wildfires are seemingly popping up with greater and greater frequency this season, but that is mostly a result of greater reporting on them. The Watch Duty app, which we wrote about and started following in late April, is proving much more effective than traditional government agency emails and tweets at alerting users to fires in their area and what the status, perimeter and size of the fire-fighting forces against them are in real-time.