As LA fires burn, see how they compare to the largest in California's history

The Palisades and Eaton fires continue to burn in California – already ranking as some of the most destructive in the state’s history.  

The fires have killed at least 24 people, put millions at risk for unhealthy air quality and some estimates for the damages are in the billions of dollars. 

As temperatures rise due to human-caused climate change, scientists predict wildfires will become more frequent and intense in western states. 

To see how wildfires are shifting in California, Paste BN analyzed state and federal data going back to 1984.  

Looking at nearly 2,000 wildfires in California, including those that burned across state boundaries, the 25 largest have all happened this century. This ranking was based on a fire’s total acreage. 

The smallest on the list, the Camp Fire in 2018, burned around 150,000 acres. The biggest, the August Complex in 2020, burned over a million acres. 

That was the only individual fire that crossed the million-acre threshold, but more and more often, annual totals of acres burned have exceeded a million acres. 

Before 2008, California had never seen more than a million acres burn in one year, but that year there were over 1.4 million acres burned. Since then, there have been four other million-acre-plus years, with the largest in 2020, when a whopping 4.3 million acres burned. 

Over the past two decades, the average acres burned per year more than doubled compared to the two decades before. 

In that time, the month when the most fires started also changed from August to July – with a median start date of about a week earlier.