Firefighters in Southern California are slowly gaining control of one of the largest wildfires in state history, but residents may not enjoy much relief as experts said the flames are laying the groundwork for the next disaster – mudslides, Reuters reports.
The intense fire is burning away vegetation that holds the soil in place and baking a waxy layer into the earth that prevents the water from sinking more than a few inches into the ground, experts said.
With one heavy rain, the soil above this waterproof layer can become saturated, start to slide in hilly areas and transform into something catastrophic.
“Pretty much anywhere there’s a fire on a steep slope, there’s cause for concern,” Jason Kean, research hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, said in a telephone interview.
And the Thomas Fire, which has burned 234,000 acres and destroyed nearly 700 homes in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, is definitely in landslide country.
“If we get hard rain, there are going to be terrible landslides in the burn areas,” Carla D‘Antonio, chairman of University of California, Santa Barbara’s environmental studies program, said in an email.
“It doesn’t take a lot of rain to get the soil and rock moving, so to have burned soil on top of this and no significant plant cover creates huge potential for landslides,” she added.