California’s state firefighting agency is within days of spending more to fight fires in a single year than ever before, and the fiscal year still has six months to go. That’s far more than the $426.8 million budgeted for the 2017-2018 fiscal year and just approaching the previous record set in fiscal 2015 of $608 million. California has been battling a scourge of historically large and historically damaging fires over the past three months. In October, the Northern California firestorm killed more than 40 people, destroyed or damaged 14,000 homes and caused $3 billion in insured losses. At times, parts of the blaze spread in a matter of hours and trapped people in their homes.

Source: Huffington Post December 16, 2017 13:00 UTC