President Joe Biden on Tuesday said his administration is working “around the clock” to control wildfires, including three currently blazing in California that have burned more than 100,000 acres of land combined and displaced thousands of residents.
Biden’s remarks came at the top of a briefing he received in the Oval Office on Tuesday on the state of wildfire season and federal efforts to reduce risk. It comes as the flames that ripped through California last week continue to blaze and a new fire arose in Larimer County in Colorado on Monday, according to local outlets.
“My administration is working closely around the clock to control these fires and protect our people, but it’s always a matter of resources,” Biden said during brief remarks to the press on Tuesday. “And I look forward to this briefing from key members of my administration, who’ve been working like hell on this, and two frontline governors.”
Two Democratic governors of western states governors, California’s Gavin Newsom and Oregon’s Tina Kotek, participated in Tuesday’s session virtually. The president also had his Interior and Agriculture secretaries, Deb Haaland and Tom Vilsak, and U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore, on hand in the Oval Office for the meeting.
“Since I’ve been president, I’ve flown over more of these wildfires — from Arizona to Idaho and Montana and all that whole crescent — than makes up the entire state of Maryland burned to the ground,” Biden said on Tuesday.
Since the start of the year, more than 37,100 fires have burned more than 7,303,800 acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, or NIFC.
Statistics from NFIC show more than 33,630 wildfires burned more than 6,336,600 acres in the U.S. from January of this year through August, marking the most acres burned from January to August in the U.S. since 2018. According to the same organization, the record number of acres burned in the same time period came in 2015 with more than 8,202,500 acres torched from January to August that year.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines wildfire season generally as the summer and fall months, noting, however, that over the last five decades, the season in the western part of the country has grown from about five months in length to more than seven months. The department also notes that the average burn time of individual fires has grown, attributing the increases to rising temperatures, reduced snowpack in the winter months and less precipitation in the summer.
According to The National Centers for Environmental Information, the U.S. saw the highest number of billion-dollar climate and weather disasters in 2023 in its history of tracking such events.
The flames still burning in California were ignited during a week of triple-digit heat in the state. Fire personnel have made progress battling the trio of blazes in recent days as temperatures subsided. Newsom secured Fire Management Assistance Grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) last week to help the state manage the fires and activated the National Guard.
Biden on Tuesday also said he wants to make $29 per hour the permanent pay rate for firefighters.
Asked about the fires during a press conference at his golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes in California last week, former President Donald Trump criticized Newsom and threatened to cut off federal assistance if he is elected again to the state to deal with futures flames if the governor does not sign paperwork to change a policy relating to water.