This is John Batcher, conversation with colleague Jeff Bliss, who is Pacific Watch, about suddenly

lots of fires breaking out in Southern California.

And what feeds them?

Why now?

The heat, the lack of humidity, the winds and what Jeff describes as the

fuel bed. Here's Jeff Bliss to explain why these wildfires suddenly out of nowhere spread thousands of acres and will continue.

It's wildfire season in California, north and south.

More of this tonight.

That's exactly what we're talking about when I talk about a fuel bed

I'm talking about for example you go up into these canyons the box canyons or the chimney type canyons and you have vegetation that's been growing there for decades, you know, it grows, it dies, it grows, it dies, the typical cycle.

And what it does is over time it just kind of settles like you think about a mattress full of straw. It kind of gets compressed that way.

And all it takes is a spark at an amber or something like that and boom it's off to

the races because you just have this tender there that's just ready to go and that leads to the bigger

vegetation, the trees and other things going up in the blaze too.