This is the most lethal wildfire season since records began, says Lucy Walker

Over 40,000 acres have been burned, 200,000 people have been evacuated and 27 people dead.

Southern California has not experienced anything like normal rainfall for years .

Rising temperatures and droughts have caused wildfires in the state to grow in severity and in scale.

From 1972 to 2019 , the area burned by wildfires increased five-fold .

Trump is a direct beneficiary of the same combination of institutional paralysis, neoliberal decay, climate denial and centrist complacency.

Most of the deaths in the 2018 wildfire season occurred in the bucolic town of Paradise during the Camp Fire in northern California ’s Butte county .

Paradise was not a refuge for the wealthy and white; it was a source of cheap homes for pensioners and younger families priced out of Sacramento Valley .

A grand jury report called for a moratorium on building new homes in fire-prone areas.

Authorities ignored it, and the flimsy emergency infrastructure all but collapsed when the fires hit.