11 Photos From a California on Fire

Current conditions: Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are carrying out damage assessments after Super Typhoon Bavi made landfall Monday as the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane • A wildfire has scorched more than 11,000 acres in the French Pyrenees, forcing thousands to evacuate • Heavy rain from Typhoon Maysak has killed at least 15 people in China this week.

THE TOP FIVE

1. 11 Western U.S. states unite to bolster the grid

The governors of 11 states across the American West signed onto a pact to speed up permitting and increase coordination on the regional electrical grid. The agreement, brokered at the Western Governors’ Association’s annual meeting last week, unites Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming behind the Western Transmission Expansion Coalition, or WestTEC. The interstate effort to build out the grid across America’s western half published a study in February that found the region needed 12,600 miles of new transmission lines over the next decade, at a cost of roughly $60 billion. Even the energy adviser to Utah Governor Spencer Cox — a Republican who has positioned himself as a vocal champion of “fiscal responsibility” — called the investment “just common sense” for the West. “Getting energy to where it’s needed, when it’s needed, is just as important as generating it in the first place,” Emy Lesofski, who also serves as the director of the Utah Office of Energy Development, said in a statement. “Think of the grid like the roads and highways connecting our communities — it doesn’t matter how much is produced if you can’t move it to where people actually live and work.”