Across the Bayou State, officials have tracked more than 450 wildfires this summer, including the massive Tiger Island and Longville fires, which by themselves have consumed 50,000 acres. At least two deaths have been attributed to the fires.
"Wildfires this many and of this intensity are unprecedented,” Mike Strain, Louisiana’s agriculture and forestry commissioner, told US media. “With this kind of heat, the low humidity and the lack of rainfall, this is probably the driest conditions, the most drought-prone conditions we’ve had in a generation."
More than three-quarters of the state is experiencing severe drought conditions, and temperatures shattered all-time highs over the weekend, with New Orleans International Airport registering 105 degrees Fahrenheit (over 40 degrees Celsius) on Sunday. The state capital of Baton Rouge is set to break its record for three-month average temperature by more than 3 degrees, according to media reports.
“Our state has never been this hot and dry and we have never had this many fires,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said on social media.
The town of Merryville in the western Beauregard Parish was forced to evacuate its entire 1,200-strong population last week as the Tiger Island Fire exploded, becoming the state’s largest on record, burning 33,000 acres. It has consumed at least 20 structures. As of Tuesday, the Tiger Island Fire was only 50% contained.
Many of the fires are being sparked by lightning strikes, authorities said, with lightning being blamed for at least 10 fire outbreaks per day.
However, some fires have also been set off by industry. On Friday, two naphtha storage tanks at the Marathon Petroleum oil refinery in Garyville caught fire, pouring black smoke in the sky.
The refinery is the country’s third-largest, producing a variety of petroleum products from asphalt and gasoline to plastics. Residents within two miles of the plant were temporarily evacuated. The fire was contained in a few hours, but two responders suffered minor injuries and 10 firefighters reported heat stress, according to local reports.
The Louisiana fires have come in the wake of a devastating blaze on the Hawaiian island of Maui earlier this month that killed more than 100 people and nearly completely consumed the historic port city of Lahaina, a town of 15,000. A lawsuit against Hawaii Electric alleges the company’s uninsulated electrical wires were responsible for the fire, which broke out amid strong winds driven by an offshore hurricane. The power company has admitted its electrical poles were toppled by the winds and that it had no contingency plan for shutting down the power grid as a result of the fire risk.
In Canada, a slew of wildfires have for months poured smoke in the skies that has reached around the planet, pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the northerly country typically emits in an entire year. Other fires have raged in Italy, Greece, Spain, and the Canary Islands, among numerous other places affected by deadly heat waves.