As blame for California’s wildfires rises over Sacramento like smoke from last year’s blazes, the state is being forced to confront the possibility that it’ll happen again in 2018.

California’s drought is worsening, and blazes have charred more acres in the first six months of this year than they did in the same period in 2017, a year that ultimately set records for destruction and deaths. The state is covered with dried-out brush and the skeletal branches of 129 million trees killed by a bark-beetle infestation. Hundreds of miles of electric transmission lines run through the dead forests and crisscross hills crowned with golden, dried grass.

More than 85 percent of the California’s natural landscape is abnormally dry, up from 22 percent at the start of the water year in September, according to data through July 10 from the U.S. Drought Monitor in Lincoln, Nebraska. Drought now covers over 44 percent of the state. That’s not good news for Californians still recovering from one of the worst-ever years for wildfires.

“It’s mirroring last year,” Scott McLean, deputy chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said in a telephone interview. “Grass and brush are just tinder, they are like a fuse for these wildfires.”

California fires consumed 12,000 more acres through July 8 than in the year-earlier period, Cal Fire data show. The actual total was 141,000 acres beyond that because some fires still haven’t been tallied in the state’s database, McLean said.

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