Fires are complex, but most experts agree one contributing factor stands above the rest: climate change.
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"It does seem like the hotter earth is generating more and more extreme weather for everybody," National Weather Service Senior Forecaster Andrew Rorke said. "When we issue a particularly dangerous situation, that's usually a 5-10 year event and here we've issued three of them in the past three months."
2024 was the hottest year on record.
For the first time ever, the global temperature rose by more than 2.7 degrees compared to the pre-industrial average - eclipsing the threshold set by the 2015 Paris Agreement.
And the heating planet causes a phenomenon that San Jose State Climate Scientist Eugene Cordero says is known as "hydroclimate whiplash."
"Where you go from dry, to wet, back to dry," Cordero said. "It's something that's challenging to forecast, but certainly something California has experienced before. We have these super dry years and then, next thing you know, we're having these floods."
That's because warm air works like a giant sponge.
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When it releases water, it can soak our state - like with the historic atmospheric rivers from past winters.
But when that water gets soaked back up, CSU East Bay Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Anthropology Tony Marks-Block says there may not be significant rainfall for months - like we've seen in Southern California.
"It becomes really prime conditions for these extreme fire events and the Santa Ana winds accelerated the spread of fire," Marks-Block said.
He adds extreme conditions like these are possible throughout the state, including here in the Bay Area.
"We know that these are not once-in-100-year events anymore, these are events that still aren't happening everywhere all the time, but the risk of these events is becoming higher," Cordero said.
As the weather becomes more unpredictable, Cordero says we may need to adjust where and how we live to prevent further destruction.