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The imminent closure of Duke University’s herbarium sparked an outcry in the natural sciences community. But the loss to climate science could be even worse.
Kathleen Pryer did not watch March Madness this year.
That isn’t unusual in and of itself — Pryer describes herself as “not a basketball person,” though that might still raise a few eyebrows this time of year at Duke University, her place of employment. But the professor of biology has been a bit distracted lately. For the past few months, she’s been on defense, fending off a loss of her own: the pending closure of the school’s herbarium.
A herbarium (or plural, herbaria) is a collection of preserved plants, typically dried and mounted on sheets of rigid paper. The oldest existing collection in the world, the Gherardo Cibo herbarium in Rome, dates back to the mid 1500s; many U.S. collections are well over a century old. Browsing digitized herbaria online, one can easily get sucked in by their unintended whimsy; though the preserved plants are scientific specimens, traditionally collected by botanists to be used in the study of taxonomy during Western biology’s golden age of naming things, the pages remind me more of the pale, beautiful botanical illustrations in my childhood copy of Thumbelina.
Duke’s herbarium turns 103 this year and contains 825,000 specimens, making it one of the largest collections in the country. But back in mid-February, Susan Alberts, Duke’s dean of natural sciences, sent an email to Pryer, who curates the herbarium, and four other associated faculty members to inform them that “it’s in the best interests of both Duke and the herbarium to find a new home or homes for these collections.”
Though there had long been rumblings about the future of Duke’s herbarium — calls for “strategic plans,” hand-wringing about funds, worry about hiring new staff — the news came as both a shock and a slap in the face to the faculty, chief among them Pryer. “It’s some kind of little stinky plot,” she told me, adding, “I didn’t just roll over when it happened. I reached out to absolutely everybody I could think of.”
The news of Duke’s herbarium closure ricocheted through the tight-knit natural sciences community. Mason Heberling, an associate curator in the Section of Botany at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, told me it should be a “wake-up call” for other researchers. The Duke herbarium is prestigious and hardly a “languishing collection,” he explained; researchers and faculty can easily slip into taking their herbaria for granted. “I’ve realized now that a huge part of my job as a curator will need to be explaining why these collections are important,” he said.
Swiftly, botanists and curators came to Duke’s defense. Opinion pieces and quotes decrying Duke’s decision appeared in the pages of The New York Times and Science. A petition went up on Change.org urging the school to reconsider its decision. Online fora burbled with discontent. “This may be the single worst thing to ever happen to Southeastern botany,” one post on Reddit read, with 64 additional comments piling on the administration for being “profit-obsessed business assholes.” “They could probably fund the entire thing with the salary of one head [basketball] coach,” grumbled another commenter.
The criticism of Duke’s decision is rooted in both a romantic nostalgia about herbaria — the same way you might feel fondly about hand-painted globes or cabinets of curiosities — and a very modern sense of scientific urgency. Researchers have only recently started leveraging the collections as invaluable pieces of data in the greater picture of climate change. “Herbaria are, in many ways, one of our best places to understand nature across space, time, and species,” Charles Davis, the curator of vascular plants at the nation’s largest private herbaria, at Harvard University, told me. “These collections are snapshots of events and occurrences in space and time that you just can’t easily replicate anywhere else. In fact, I would argue it’s impossible.”
Think of it this way: Worldwide, there are about 3,600 herbaria located in 193 different countries that collectively hold about 400 million specimens. Botanists estimate as much as half of the planet’s undiscovered flora could be found in herbaria backlogs. Barbara Thiers, the editor of the Index Herbariorum, a digital guide to the world’s collections, told me that when she was the director of the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium, “we had a huge room filled with unidentified species; I think there were 35,000 or 40,000 specimens in there.” That wasn’t for lack of effort — Thiers said that for many of the plant groups, there simply aren’t any working experts or published literature for curators to consult.
Because the climate is changing so fast, many plants in herbaria will go extinct before they’re formally discovered and named, a process known as a “dark extinction.” “It’s a very sobering feeling to touch the leaves of a tree that doesn’t exist anymore,” Erin Zimmerman, an evolutionary biologist and author of the forthcoming book Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save an Old Science, told me, recalling coming across such a specimen in an herbarium while doing her own research. She likened herbaria to a library, but in her description I also heard echoes of a church: “The specimens are sometimes very old; you have to be very gentle with them, which just adds to the sense of holding something precious,” she went on.
Dwindling biodiversity is only the most obvious way herbaria are critical to 21st-century science. “Phenology, whether it’s when plants flower or when birds migrate, is one of the most important signals of climate change response,” Davis, the Harvard curator, said. Still, our long-term datasets aren’t very robust; research on how plants are changing with warming climates typically dates back only 25 to 30 years, tends to concentrate on the U.S. and Western Europe, and centers on easily observable phenomena, like the leafing out of woody trees. Researchers can turn to herbaria for centuries-old records of where certain plants grew and when they flowered, helping to bridge gaps in our understanding.
Heberling, of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, tracks environmental changes in his research, but he didn’t start using herbaria until well after he’d obtained his Ph.D. Only then did he realize “herbarium specimens are incredible archives of the past,” he told me.
“You can look at the tiny pores, the stomata, on the leaves” of a plant in a herbarium and “see how that has changed over time with increased carbon dioxide,” Heberling said. Scientists have even used this method to create CO2 records.
Admittedly, climate science is still a relatively cutting-edge use case for the herbarium; according to Davis’ research, “global change biology” remains one of the least popular ways to leverage herbaria, well behind “taxonomic monographs” and “species distributions” that still dominate the field. Still, “there are things that, five to 10 years ago, I’d never even imagined we’d be doing today with herbarium specimens,” he told me.
As a result, Duke’s herbarium closure has made some question the university’s commitment to climate research — something that Alberts, the school’s natural sciences dean, emphatically refuted when I raised the question with her. She told me that a rough search revealed that only 23 of the 2,000 papers published by Duke researchers over the past few decades on climate change contained the word “herbarium” anywhere in them. “With my knowledge about all of the climate change research that’s been going on at Duke, the herbarium is not really central to whether or not Duke studies climate change,” she said.
For her part, Pryer has bristled at the administration’s insinuations that the herbarium is of limited use to students and faculty on campus. “You don’t measure a collection by who uses it,” she told me. “As I’ve been naughty enough to say, it’s not a toilet. People outside — the global community — uses it. That’s how you measure its value; things like 90 refereed publications a year [across all disciplines] cite the Duke collections.” Pryer can quickly tick off the climate projects that have come through the herbarium’s halls, including her recent supervision of a local high schooler’s research paper that found the pink lady’s slipper is flowering in the area 17 days earlier than it used to.
Duke is “not an appropriate home for a herbarium that is this large and valuable” for a number of reasons, according to Alberts, ranging from the need to hire new faculty to manage it (Pryer and several of her colleagues are approaching retirement) to the collection’s current building needing renovations. “I have had people email me saying, ‘I know you have enough money, I know you have the facilities.’ I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, you should tell me who you’re talking to, because we don’t,’” Alberts said. She added that she plans to be personally involved in finding the right home for Duke’s herbarium over the next several years.
After all, it’s not like the potential untapped climate records in the Duke collection are being destroyed (though both Pryer and Davis told me they’ve had deans wonder aloud if they could be, since many herbaria are now digitized). The goal is only to move the collection somewhere where it might be better utilized.
Thiers, though, said this is exactly what makes the natural science community so alarmed. As the collection is split up, ideally, the Index Herbariorum would record where Duke’s specimens get sent so scientists can still find them. But when new collections absorb the materials, curators will weed out duplicates, sending unneeded pages elsewhere — at which point specimens can fall between the cracks. “Before you know it, individual specimens will be lost,” Thiers said. “I can almost guarantee that as these secondary moves happen, people will not keep up with the database records.”
There is also a worst-case scenario everyone seemed nervous to mention: that Duke’s collection, in whole or in part, will end up in storage somewhere. Herbarium specimens are extremely susceptible to insect damage and must be kept in expensive, climate-controlled cabinets and rooms. “If they’re putting boxes in a storage storeroom someplace, they’ll be worthless in no time,” Thiers warned. The unidentified plants and uncollected climate data — all of it could be lost. And the cruelest part? Scientists wouldn’t even know what they are losing; it’s a dark extinction of a dark extinction.
When I spoke with Alberts, she said there were no updates on the administration’s plans for the herbarium. She expressed sympathy, though, for the faculty who oppose the administration’s decision. The herbarium “is their life’s work, and it’s important that they have a voice in this process,” she said.
Pryer is determined to keep fighting, even if this isn’t exactly how she’d pictured spending her golden years at Duke. “It’s having an impact on my research and on my health,” she told me. “It’s been pretty unrelenting. I’m anxious for something to resolve.”
She looked tired. There was a faculty meeting later in the day, and she hoped she’d be able to get more clarity about the administration’s decision then. “I don’t want this to go on forever,” she said. “But I also don’t want there to be a decision that makes Duke look insane.”
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Half of all Americans are sweating under one right now.
Like a bomb cyclone, a polar vortex, or an atmospheric river, a heat dome is a meteorological phenomenon that feels, well, a little made up. I hadn’t heard the term before I found myself bottled beneath one in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, where I saw leaves and needles brown on living trees. Ultimately, some 1,400 people died from the extreme heat in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon that summer weekend.
Since that disaster, there have been a number of other high-profile heat dome events in the United States, including this week, over the Midwest and now Eastern and Southeastern parts of the country. On Monday, roughly 150 million people — about half the nation’s population — faced extreme or major heat risks.
“I think the term ‘heat dome’ was used sparingly in the weather forecasting community from 10 to 30 years ago,” AccuWeather senior meteorologist Brett Anderson told me, speaking with 36 years as a forecaster under his belt. “But over the past 10 years, with global warming becoming much more focused in the public eye, we are seeing ‘heat dome’ being used much more frequently,” he went on. “I think it is a catchy term, and it gets the public’s attention.”
Catching the public’s attention is critical. Heat is the deadliest weather hazard in the U.S., killing more people annually than hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, or extreme cold. “There is a misunderstanding of the risk,” Ashley Ward, the director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University, told me. “A lot of people — particularly working age or younger people — don’t feel like they’re at risk when, in fact, they are.”
While it seems likely that the current heat dome won’t be as deadly as the one in 2021 — not least because the Midwest and Southeastern regions of the country have a much higher usage of air conditioning than the Pacific Northwest — the heat in the eastern half of the country is truly extraordinary. Tampa, Florida reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday for the first time in its recorded history. Parts of the Midwest last week, where the heat dome formed before gradually moving eastward, hit a heat index of 128 degrees.
Worst of all, though, have been the accompanying record-breaking overnight temperatures, which Ward told me were the most lethal characteristics of a heat dome. “When there are both high daytime temperatures and persistently high overnight temperatures, those are the most dangerous of circumstances,” Ward said.
Although the widespread usage of the term “heat dome” may be relatively new, the phenomenon itself is not. The phrase describes an area of “unusually strong” high pressure situated in the upper atmosphere, which pockets abnormally warm air over a particular region, Anderson, the forecaster, told me. “These heat domes can be very expansive and can linger for days, and even a full week or longer,” he said.
Anderson added that while he hasn’t seen evidence of an increase in the number of heat domes due to climate change, “we may be seeing more extreme and longer-lasting heat domes” due to the warmer atmosphere. A heat dome in Europe this summer, which closed the Eiffel Tower, tipped temperatures over 115 degrees in parts of Spain, and killed an estimated 2,300 people, has been linked to anthropogenic warming. And research has borne out that the temperatures and duration reached in the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”
The link between climate change and heat domes is now strong enough to form the basis for a major legal case. Multnomah County, the Oregon municipality that includes Portland, filed a lawsuit in 2023 against 24 named defendants, including oil and gas companies ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, seeking $50 million in damages and $1.5 billion in future damages for the defendants’ alleged role in the deaths from the 2021 heat dome.
“As we learned in this country when we took on Big Tobacco, this is not an easy step or one I take lightly, but I do believe it’s our best way to fight for our community and protect our future,” Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said in a statement at the time. The case is now in jeopardy following moves by the Trump administration to prevent states, counties, and cities from suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages. (The estate of a 65-year-old woman who died in the heat dome filed a similar wrongful death lawsuit in Seattle’s King County Superior Court against Big Oil.)
Given the likelihood of longer and hotter heat dome events, then, it becomes imperative to educate people about how to stay safe. As Ward mentioned, many people who are at risk of extreme heat might not even know it, such as those taking commonly prescribed medications for anxiety, depression, PTSD, diabetes, and high blood pressure, which interfere with the body’s ability to thermoregulate. “Let’s just say recently you started taking high blood pressure medicine,” Ward said. “Every summer prior, you never had a problem working in your garden or doing your lawn work. You might this year.”
Air conditioning, while life-saving, can also stop working for any number of reasons, from a worn out machine part to a widespread grid failure. Vulnerable community members may also face hurdles in accessing reliable AC. There’s a reason the majority of heat-related deaths happen indoors.
People who struggle to manage their energy costs should prioritize cooling a single space, such as a bedroom, and focus on maintaining a cool core temperature during overnight hours, when the body undergoes most of its recovery. Blotting yourself with a wet towel or washcloth and sitting in front of a fan can help during waking hours, as can visiting a traditional cooling center, or even a grocery store or movie theater.
Health providers also have a role to play, Ward stressed. “They know who has chronic underlying health conditions,” she said. “Normalize asking them about their situation with air conditioning. Normalize asking them, ‘Do you feel like you have a safe place to go that’s cool, that you can get out of this heat?’”
For the current heat dome, at least, the end is in sight: Incoming cool air from Canada will drop temperatures by 10 to 20 degrees in cities like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., with lows potentially in the 30s by midweek in parts of New York. And while there are still hot days ahead for Florida and the rest of the Southeast, the cold front will reach the region by the end of the week.
But even if this ends up being the last heat dome of the summer, it certainly won’t be in our lifetimes. The heat dome has become inescapable.
On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans
Current conditions: New York City is once again choking on Canadian wildfire smoke • Torrential rain is flooding southeastern Slovenia and northern Croatia • Central Asia is bracing for the hottest days of the year, with temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Uzbekistan’s capital of Tashkent all week.
In May, the Trump administration signaled its plans to gut Energy Star, the energy efficiency certification program administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Energy Star is extremely popular — its brand is recognized by nearly 90% of Americans — and at a cost to the federal government of just $32 million per year, saves American households upward of $40 billion in energy costs per year as of 2024, for a total of more than $500 billion saved since its launch in 1992, by the EPA’s own estimate. Not only that, as one of Energy Star’s architects told Heatmap’s Jeva Lange back in May, more energy efficient appliances and buildings help reduce strain on the grid. “Think about the growing demands of data center computing and AI models,” RE Tech Advisors’ Deb Cloutier told Jeva. “We need to bring more energy onto the grid and make more space for it.”
That value has clearly resonated with lawmakers on the Hill. Legislators tasked with negotiating appropriations in both the Senate and the House of Representatives last week proposed fully funding Energy Star at $32 million for the next fiscal year. It’s unclear how the House’s decision to go into recess until September will affect the vote, but Ben Evans, the federal legislative director at the U.S. Green Building Council, said the bill is “a major step in the right direction demonstrating that ENERGY STAR has strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.”
A worker connects panels on floating solar farm project in Huainan, China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
The United States installed just under 11 gigawatts of solar panels in the first three months of this year, industry data show. In June alone, China installed nearly 15 gigawatts, PV Tech reported. And, in a detail that demonstrates just how many panels the People’s Republic has been deploying at home in recent years, that represented an 85% drop from the previous month and close to a 40% decline compared to June of last year.
The photovoltaic installation plunge followed Beijing’s rollout of two new policies that changed the renewables business in China. The first, called the 531 policy, undid guaranteed feed-in tariffs and required renewable projects to sell electricity on the spot market. That took effect on June 1. The other, called the 430 policy, took effect on May 1 and mandated that new distributed solar farms consume their own power first before allowing the sale of surplus electricity to the grid. As a result of the stalled installations, a top panel manufacturer warned the trade publication Opis that companies may need to raise prices by as much as 10%.
For years now, Fortescue, the world’s fourth-biggest producer of iron ore, has directed much of the earnings from its mines in northwest Australia and steel mills in China toward building out a global green hydrogen business. But changes to U.S. policy have taken a toll. Last week, Fortescue told investors it was canceling its green hydrogen project in Arizona, which had been set to come online next year. It’s also abandoning its plans for a green hydrogen plant on Australia’s northeastern coast, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“A shift in policy priorities away from green energy has changed the situation in the U.S.,” Gus Pichot, Fortescue’s chief executive of growth and energy, told analysts on a call. “The lack of certainty and a step back in green ambition has stopped the emerging green-energy markets, making it hard for previously feasible projects to proceed.” But green hydrogen isn’t dead everywhere. Just last week, the industrial gas firm Air Liquide made a final decision to invest in a 200-megawatt green hydrogen plant in the Netherlands.
The Trump administration put two high-ranking officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on administrative leave, CNN reported. The reasoning behind the move wasn’t clear, but both officials — Steve Volz, who leads NOAA’s satellites division, and Jeff Dillen, NOAA’s deputy general counsel — headed up the investigation into whether President Donald Trump violated NOAA’s scientific integrity policies during his so-called Sharpiegate scandal.
The incident from September 2019, during Trump’s first term, started when the president incorrectly listed Alabama among the states facing a threat from Hurricane Dorian. Throughout the following week, Trump defended the remark, insisting he had been right, and ultimately showed journalists a weather map that had been altered with a black Sharpie market to show the path of the storm striking Alabama. NOAA’s investigation into the incident concluded that Neil Jacobs, the former agency official who backed Trump at the time and is now nominated to serve as chief, succumbed to political pressure and violated scientific integrity rules.
In March, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Senate passed a bill to repeal the state’s climate law and scrap the 2030 deadline by which the monopoly utility Duke Energy had to slash its planet-heating emissions by 70% compared to 2005 levels. Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, vetoed the legislation. But on Tuesday, the GOP majorities in both chambers of the legislature plan to vote to override the veto.
Doing so and enacting the bill could cost North Carolina more than 50,000 jobs annually and cause tens of billions of dollars in lost investments, Canary Media’s Elizabeth Ouzts reported. That’s according to a new study from a consultancy commissioned by clean-energy advocates in the state. The analysis is based on data from the state-sanctioned consumer advocate, Public Staff.
For years, a mystery has puzzled scientists: Why did Neanderthal remains show levels of a nitrogen isotope only seen among carnivores like hyenas and wolves that eat more meat than a hominid could safely consume? New research finally points to an answer: Neanderthals were eating putrefying meat garnished with maggots, said Melanie Beasley, an anthropologist at Purdue University. “When you get the lean meat and the fatty maggot, you have a more complete nutrient that you’re consuming.”
Oregon’s Cram Fire was a warning — the Pacific Northwest is ready to ignite.
What could have been the country’s first designated megafire of 2025 spluttered to a quiet, unremarkable end this week. Even as national headlines warned over the weekend that central Oregon’s Cram Fire was approaching the 100,000-acre spread usually required to achieve that status, cooler, damper weather had already begun to move into the region. By the middle of the week, firefighters had managed to limit the Cram to 95,736 acres, and with mop-up operations well underway, crews began rotating out for rest or reassignment. The wildfire monitoring app Watch Duty issued what it said would be its final daily update on the Cram Fire on Thursday morning.
By this time in 2024, 10 megafires had already burned or ignited in the U.S., including the more-than-million-acre Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas last spring. While it may seem wrong to describe 2025 as a quieter fire season so far, given the catastrophic fires in the Los Angeles area at the start of the year, it is currently tracking below the 10-year average for acres burned at this point in the season. Even the Cram, a grassland fire that expanded rapidly due to the hot, dry conditions of central Oregon, was “not [an uncommon fire for] this time of year in the area,” Bill Queen, a public information officer with the Pacific Northwest Complex Incident Management Team 3, told me over email.
At the same time, the Cram Fire can also be read as a precursor. It was routine, maybe, but also large enough to require the deployment of nearly 900 fire personnel at a time when the National Wildland Fire Preparedness Level is set to 4, meaning national firefighting resources were already heavily committed when it broke out. (The preparedness scale, which describes how strapped federal resources are, goes up to 5.) Most ominous of all, though, is the forecast for the Pacific Northwest for “Dirty August” and “Snaptember,” historically the two worst months of the year in the region for wildfires.
National Interagency Coordination Center
“Right now, we’re in a little bit of a lull,” Jessica Neujahr, a public affairs officer with the Oregon Department of Forestry, acknowledged to me. “What comes with that is knowing that August and September will be difficult, so we’re now doing our best to make sure that our firefighters are taking advantage of having time to rest and get rejuvenated before the next big wave of fire comes through.”
That next big wave could happen any day. The National Interagency Fire Center’s fire potential outlook, last issued on July 1, describes “significant fire potential” for the Northwest that is “expected to remain above average areawide through September.” The reasons given include the fact that “nearly all areas” of Washington and Oregon are “abnormally dry or in drought status,” combined with a 40% to 60% probability of above-average temperatures through the start of the fall in both states. Moisture from the North American Monsoon, meanwhile, looks to be tracking “largely east of the Northwest.” At the same time, “live fuels in Oregon are green at mid to upper elevations but are drying rapidly across Washington.”
In other words, the components for a bad fire season are all there — the landscape just needs a spark. Lightning, in particular, has been top of mind for Oregon forecasters, given the tinderbox on the ground. A single storm system, such as one that rolled over southeast and east-central Oregon in June, can produce as many as 10,000 lightning strikes; over the course of just one night earlier this month, thunderstorms ignited 72 fires in two southwest Oregon counties. And the “kicker with lightning is that the fires don’t always pop up right away,” Neujahr explained. Instead, lightning strike fires can simmer for up to a week after a storm, evading the detection of firefighting crews until it’s too late. “When you have thousands of strikes in a concentrated area, it’s bound to stretch the local resources as far as they can go,” Neujahr said.
National Interagency Coordination Center
The National Interagency Fire Center has “low confidence … regarding the number of lightning ignitions” for the end of summer in the Northwest, in large part due to the incredible difficulty of forecasting convective storms. Additionally, the current neutral phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation means there is a “wide range of potential lightning activity” that adds extra uncertainty to any predictions. The NIFC’s higher confidence in its temperature and precipitation outlooks, in turn, “leads to a belief that the ratio of human to natural ignitions will remain high and at or above 2024 levels.” (An exploding transformer appears to have been the ignition source for the Cram Fire; approximately 88% of wildfires in the United States have human-caused origins, including arson.)
Periodic wildfires are a naturally occurring part of the Western ecosystem, and not all are attributable to climate change. But before 1995, the U.S. averaged fewer than one megafire per year; between 2005 and 2014, that average jumped to 9.8 such fires per year. Before 1970, there had been no documented megafires at all.
Above-average temperatures and drought conditions, which can make fires larger and burn hotter, are strongly associated with a warming atmosphere, however. Larger and hotter fires are also more dangerous. “Our biggest goal is always to put the fires out as fast as possible,” Neujahr told me. “There is a correlation: As fires get bigger, the cost of the fire grows, but so do the risks to the firefighters.”
In Oregon, anyway, the Cram Fire’s warning has registered. Shortly after the fire broke out, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek declared a statewide emergency with an eye toward the months ahead. “The summer is only getting hotter, drier, and more dangerous — we have to be prepared for worsening conditions,” she said in a statement at the time.
It’s improbable that there won’t be a megafire this season; the last time the U.S. had a year without a fire of 100,000 acres or more was in 2001. And if or when the megafire — or megafires — break out, all signs point to the “where” being Oregon or Washington, concentrating the area of potential destruction, exhausting local personnel, and straining federal resources. “When you have two states directly next to each other dealing with the same thing, it just makes it more difficult to get resources because of the conflicting timelines,” Neujahr said.
By October, at least, there should be relief: The national fire outlook describes “an increasing frequency of weather systems and precipitation” that should “signal an end of fire season” for the Northwest once fall arrives. But there are still a long 68 days left to go before then.