Imagine 74 of the 75 largest cities in the United States going up in flames over the course of a few months. The loss would be astronomical.

While that’s a highly unlikely scenario, one harsh reality to contemplate is the fact that the combined area of those 74 cities is roughly equivalent to the total number of acres burned in the 2018 US wildfire season.

According to CoreLogic, a global property information, analytics and data-enabled solutions provider, approximately 8,767,492 US acres burned in 2018, marking the sixth highest total since modern historical records began in the mid-1900s.

In the past 20-years, the average annual amount of burned acreage has increased, and, in the same timeframe, larger and more devastating wildfire events have occurred.