More than 300 firefighters were scrambling yesterday, Thursday, to bring the biggest wildfire this year in California under control.

This fire, dubbed “Madre” (mother), broke out Wednesday in San Luis Obispo County, a rural county in the central part of the state. About 200 people have been ordered evacuated and around ten buildings are threatened by the flames.

More than the potential damage, however, what is of concern is the speed at which this fire is spreading:in one 24-hour period it has burned nearly 213 square kilometers, according to the latest update from the California Fire Department’s CalFire.

Images from the state’s warning system show dense clouds of smoke over the hills in this area.

“The state will always be present to protect all communities wherever wildfires occur,” California Governor Gavin Newsome’s office noted in an X post announcing the deployment of reinforcements.

This fire comes after several others in recent days that have caused the evacuation of citizens in the eastern region of Los Angeles, raising fears of a difficult summer in California.

That state is still recovering from the trauma of the wildfires that swept through Los Angeles and claimed the lives of 30 people in January.

The winter and spring have been unusually dry in Southern California, and the vegetation has already dried out as if it were mid-summer, Daniel Swain, an extreme events expert at UCLA, noted recently in a blog post.

“Considering the forecasts that herald even more intense and generalized heat in late summer, this month or two when the degree of drought of vegetation is already higher will have a major impact on burning conditions later in the period,” he stressed.

This increased risk comes at a time when Trump is implementing significant budget cuts and layoffs at the Forest Service, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and FEMA, the federal disaster management agency.

“We need a corresponding commitment of resources, not fine words,” he noted, recalling that “57 percent of the land in this state is under the jurisdiction of the federal government.”