By John Ruberry
Is it a wildfire if an arsonist sets it?
It’s been a brutal season for wildfires in the west. Climate change of course is usually blamed for these fires but what about arson?
The Fawn Fire in northern California, which has burned about 13 square miles, is fully contained after two weeks of destruction. It has destroyed 185 buildings.
How did it start?
A former San Francisco Bay Area yoga teacher, Alexandra Souverneva who claims to be a shaman on her LinkedIn page, is accused of accidentally starting it while trying to boil water to remove bear urine from it. But a California newspaper says that Souverneva may be connected to other fires.
Gary Maynard, a former college professor, is being held without bail for allegedly setting several fires near the Dixie Fire in northern California. He is not accused of starting the Dixie Fire, but the cause of that blaze, which is still undetermined, may have been caused by Pacific Gas and Electric equipment.
This year, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, over 100 people have been accused of wildland arson.
Conditions are very dry in California–it is suffering from drought conditions. If an arsonist attempts to start a fire in one of the forest preserves near where I live in Morton Grove, Illinois, it will likely be a slow burn, as we’ve had a wet summer here. In California the results will be horribly different.
If you haven’t heard about arson as the cause of wildfires it’s probably because the mainstream media, to protect another of its narratives, in this case that climate change is an existential threat to humanity, is minimizing arson’s role in wildfires.
But CNN sees the arson angle of wildfires as a serious enough of a threat to that narrative that it published an article in August debunking it.
Arson-caused wildfires is something to keep your eye on.
John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.
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