LOS ANGELES _ In Big Bear Lake, officials worry about an explosive wildfire roaring through the resort city, trapping tens of thousands of people.
In the Santa Monica Mountains, authorities stage a mock evacuation in Mandeville Canyon, where police discover they are too slow to rescue residents from a wildfire disaster.
And in the thick forest of the San Jacinto Mountains, an Idyllwild resident laments that his town "resembles an arsonist's dream."
On the heels of the deadliest and most destructive wildfire season in state history, officials across California are growing increasingly anxious over what many fear will be another one.
Fire experts and climatologists warn that the heavy rains of recent months produced an excess of vegetation, which over the hot summer will become dry fuel. At the same time, the death toll from last fall's Camp and Woolsey fires _ and the Tubbs fire the year before that _ has highlighted the vulnerability of communities throughout the state.
In a meeting with emergency managers recently, Gov. Gavin Newsom urged officials to "prepare for the worst" and then gave voice to a growing sense of dread.
"We just can't take this anymore," Newsom told the gathering. "The state can't take 2018 again. Can't do 2017 ... . We can't take it anymore."
After the Camp fire killed 85 people in and around the town of Paradise _ and revealed glaring shortcomings in municipal evacuation plans _ the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection conducted a risk assessment that found an estimated 11 million residents, or 1 in 4 Californians, live in areas considered to be at "high risk" of a wildfire.
"I anticipate there's a whole lot of people in suburban Southern California, and frankly in the Bay Area, that would never consider themselves a part of that '1 out of 4 Californians that live in a fire risk area,' but they actually do," said Wade Crowfoot, head of the California Natural Resources Agency.
