The Brief

Cal Fire Battalion Chief Jon Heggie wasn’t expecting much to worry about when a late summer fire erupted north of Santa Cruz, home to California’s moist and cool “asbestos forests.” This place doesn’t burn, he thought, with just three notable fires there in 70 years.

Heggie’s job was to predict for the crews where the wildfire might go and when, working through calculations based on topography, weather and fuels — the “immutable” basics. For fire behavior analysts like Heggie, predictable and familiar are manageable, while weird and unexpected are synonyms for danger.

But that 2020 fire was anything but predictable.

Around 3 a.m. on Aug. 16, ominous thunder cells formed over the region. Tens of thousands of lightning strikes rained down, creating a convulsion of fire that became the CZU Lightning Complex.

By noon there were nearly two dozen fires burning, and not nearly enough people to handle them. Flames were roaring throughout the Coast Range in deep-shaded forests and waist-high ferns in sight of the Pacific Ocean. No one had ever seen anything like it. The blaze defied predictions and ran unchecked for a month. The fire spread to San Mateo County, burned through 86,000 acres, destroyed almost 1,500 structures and killed a fleeing resident.

“It was astonishing to see that behavior and consumption of heavy fuels,” Heggie said. “Seeing the devastation was mind-boggling. Things were burning outside the norm. I hadn’t seen anything burn that intensely in my 30 years.”

Almost as troubling was what this fire didn’t do — it didn’t back off at night.

“We would have burning periods increase in the afternoon, and we saw continuous high-intensity burns in the night,” Heggie said. “That’s when we are supposed to make up ground. That didn’t happen.”

That 2020 summer of fires, the worst in California history, recalibrated what veteran firefighters understand about fire behavior: Nothing is as it was.

Intensified by climate change, especially warmer nights and longer droughts, California’s fires often morph into megafires, and even gigafires covering more than a million acres. U.S. wildfires have been four times larger and three times more frequent since 2000, according to University of Colorado researchers. And other scientists recently predicted that up to 52% more California forest acreage will burn in summertime over the next two decades because of the changing climate.

As California now heads into its peak time for wildfires, even with last year’s quiet season and the end of its three-year drought, the specter of megafires hasn’t receded. Last winter’s record winter rains, rather than tamping down fire threats, have promoted lush growth, which provides more fuel for summer fires.

Cal Fire officials warn that this year’s conditions are similar to the summer and fall of 2017 — when a rainy winter was followed by one of the state’s most destructive fire seasons, killing 47 people and destroying almost 11,000 structures.

US Forest Service teams deploy drones to capture photographs and infrared images, which are used to map fires to find areas where flames are still active and where they might spread. Photo by Andrew Avitt, US Forest Service

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Andrew Avitt

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US Forest Service

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It’s not just the size and power of modern wildfires, but their capricious behavior that has confounded fire veterans — the feints and shifts that bedevil efforts to predict what a fire might do and then devise strategies to stop it. It’s a dangerous calculation: In the literal heat of a fire, choices are consequential. People’s lives and livelihoods are at stake.

Cal Fire crews now often find themselves outflanked. Responding to larger and more erratic and intense fires requires more personnel and equipment. And staging crews and engines where flames are expected to go has been thrown off-kilter.

“We live in this new reality,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a recent Cal Fire event, “where we can’t necessarily attach ourselves to some of the more predictive models of the past because of a world that is getting a lot hotter, a lot drier and a lot more uncertain because of climate change.”

CalFire has responded by tapping into all the new technology — such as drones, military satellites, infrared images and AI-assisted maps — that can be brought to bear during a fire. Commanders now must consider a broader range of possibilities so they can pivot when the firefront shifts in an unexpected way. The agency also has beefed up its ability to fight nighttime fires with a new fleet of Fire Hawk helicopters equipped to fly in darkness.

The state has thrown every possible data point at the problem with its year-old Wildfire Threat and Intelligence Integration Center, which pulls information from dozens of federal, state and private sources to create a minute-by-minute picture of conditions conducive to sparking or spreading fires.

“We’re enlisting cutting-edge technology in our efforts to fight wildfires,” Newsom said, “exploring how innovations like artificial intelligence can help us identify threats quicker and deploy resources smarter.”

An unforeseen assault on a coastal town

The 2017 Thomas Fire stands as an example of what happens when a massive fire, ignited after a rainy winter, veers and shifts in unexpected ways.

The blaze in coastal Ventura and Santa Barbara counties struck in December, when fire season normally has quieted down. Fire veterans knew fall and winter fires were tamed by a blanket of moist air and fog.

But that didn’t happen.

“We were on day five or six, and the incident commander comes to me and asks, ‘Are we going to have to evacuate Carpinteria tonight?’,” said Cal Fire Assistant Chief Tim Chavez, who was the fire behavior analyst for the Thomas Fire. “I looked at the maps and we both came to the conclusion that Carpinteria would be fine, don’t worry. Sure enough, that night it burned into Carpinteria and they had to evacuate the town.”

Based on fire and weather data and informed hunches, no one expected the fire to continue advancing overnight. And, as the winds calmed, no one predicted the blaze would move toward the small seaside community of 13,000 south of Santa Barbara. But high temperatures, low humidity and a steep, dry landscape that hadn’t felt flames in more than 30 years drew the Thomas Fire to the coast.

The sudden shift put the town in peril. Some 300 residents were evacuated in the middle of the night as the blaze moved into the eastern edge of Carpinteria.

In all, the fire, which was sparked by power lines downed by high winds, burned for nearly 40 days, spread across 281,000 acres, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and other buildings and killed two people, including a firefighter. At the time, it was the largest wildfire in California’s modern history; now, just six years later, it ranks at number eight.

The Thomas Fire burning in the hills above Montecito, Summerland, and Carpinteria on Dec. 13, 2017.

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George Rose

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The unforeseen assault on Carpenteria was an I-told-you-so from nature, the sort of humbling slap-down that fire behavior analysts in California are experiencing more and more.

“I’ve learned more from being wrong than from being right,” Chavez said. “You cannot do this job and not be surprised by something you see. Even the small fires will surprise you sometimes.”

Warmer nights, drought, lack of fog alter fire behavior

Scientists say the past 20 years have brought a profound — and perhaps irreversible — shift in the norms of wildfire behavior and intensity. Fires burn along the coast even when there’s no desert winds to drive them, fires refuse to lay down at night and fires pierced the so-called Redwood Curtain, burning 97% of California’s oldest state park, Big Basin Redwoods.

The changes in wildfires are driven by an array of factors: a megadrought from the driest period recorded in the Western U.S. in the past 1,200 years, the loss of fog along the California coast, and stubborn nighttime temperatures that propel flames well into the night.

Higher temperatures and longer dry periods are linked to worsening fires in Western forests, with an eightfold increase from 1985 to 2017 in severely burned acreage, according to a 2020 study. “Warmer and drier fire seasons corresponded with higher severity fire,” the researchers wrote, suggesting that “climate change will contribute to increased fire severity in future decades.”

“What we are seeing is a dramatic increase in extreme fire behavior,” Heggie said. “When you have a drought lasting 10 years, devastating the landscape, you have dead fuel loading and available fuel for when these fires start. That’s the catalyst for megafire. That’s been the driving force for change in fire behavior.”

About 33% of coastal summer fog has vanished since the turn of the century, according to researchers at UC Berkeley. That blanket of cool, moist air that kept major fires out of coastal areas can no longer be relied upon to safeguard California’s redwood forests.

Firefighters are losing another ally, too, with the significant increase in overnight temperatures. Nighttime fires were about 28% more intense in 2020 than in 2003. And there are more of them — 11 more “flammable nights” every year than 40 years ago, an increase of more than 40%.

The upshot is that fires are increasingly less likely to “lie down” at night, when fire crews could work to get ahead of the flames. The loss of those hours to perform critical suppression work — and the additional nighttime spread — gives California crews less time to catch up with fast-moving blazes.

Also, fire whirls and so-called firenados are more common as a feature of erratic fire behavior. The twisting vortex of flames, heat and wind can rise in columns hundreds of feet high and are spun by high winds.

Firenados are more than frightening to behold: They spread embers and strew debris for miles and make already dangerous fires all the more risky. One was spotted north of Los Angeles last summer.

Fires are “really changing, and it’s a combination of all kinds of different changes,” said Jennifer Balch, director of the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Inclusion Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder and a longtime fire researcher who tracks trends that drive wildfires.

“We're losing fog. We're seeing drier conditions longer and later into the season. And so what that means for California right now is, under these record heat waves, we're also now butting up against the Santa Ana wind conditions,” she said. “I think we're loading the dice in a certain direction.”

A fire behaviorist’s day

Among the many specialists at work are fire behavior analysts, who are responsible for predicting a fire’s daily movements for the incident commander. As a fire rages, Cal Fire analysts get their information in an avalanche of highly technical data, including wind force and direction, temperature and humidity, the shape and height of slopes, the area’s burn history, which fuels are on the ground and, in some cases, how likely they are to burn.

Gleaned from satellites, drones, planes, remote sensors and computer mapping, the information is spat out in real time and triaged by the fire behavior analyst, who often uses a computer program to prepare models to predict what the fire is likely to do.

That information is synthesized and relayed — quickly — to fire bosses. Laptops and hand-held computers are ubiquitous on modern firelines, replacing the time-honored practice of spreading a dog-eared map on the hood of a truck.

“On a typical day I would get up at 4:30 or 5,” said Chavez, who has served as a fire behavior analyst for much of his career. “We get an infrared fire map from overnight aircraft, and that tells us where the fire is active. Other planes fly in a grid pattern and we look at those still images. I might look at computer models, fire spread models, and the weather forecast. There’s other data that tells you what fuels are in the area. You plug all that in to see where the fire will be 24 hours from now.”

At the fire camp’s 8 a.m. briefing, “you get two minutes to tell people what to watch out for,” he said. Throughout the day, Chavez says he monitors available data and hitches a helicopter ride to view the fire from the air. At another meeting at 5 p.m., he and other officers prepare the next day’s incident action plan. Then he’s back to collating more weather and fire data. The aim is to get to bed before midnight.

"We're losing fog. We're seeing drier conditions longer and later into the season...I think we're loading the dice in a certain direction," said Jennifer Balch, director of the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Inclusion Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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Aaron Ontivaeroz

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The importance of the fire behavior analyst’s job is reflected by the sophistication of the tools available: real-time NOAA satellite data, weather information from military flights, radar, computer-generated maps showing a 100-year history of previous burns in the area as well as the current fuel load and its combustibility, airplane and drone surveillance and AI-enabled models of future fire movements. Aircraft flying over fires provide more detail, faster, about what’s inside fire plumes, critical information to fire bosses.

In California, the National Guard is entering the fourth year of an agreement to share non-classified information pulled from military satellites that scan for heat signatures from the boost phase of ballistic missiles. When those heat images are associated with wildfires, the agency’s FireGuard system can transmit detailed information to Cal Fire every 15 minutes.

Meteorologist Craig Clements, director of the Fire Weather Research Laboratory at San Jose State University, has chased fires for a decade.

“We can pull up on a fire, and the radar starts spinning and you’re peering into a plume within four minutes,” Clements said. “It gives us information about the particles inside, the structure of it.”

This map was produced by supercomputers at a lab at University of Colorado Boulder that is using metadata to better understand large wildfires and their increasingly erratic behavior. Photo by Aaron Ontivaeroz for CalMatters

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Fire behavior decisions are not totally reliant on outside data inputs. Seasoned fire commanders remain firmly committed to a reliable indicator: the hair on the back of their necks.

Fireline experience and hard-earned knowledge still counts when formulating tactics. But it’s a measure of how norms have shifted that even that institutional knowledge can fail.

Future of firefighting: AI crunches billions of data points

Perhaps the biggest leap is applying artificial intelligence to understand fire behavior. Neil Sahota, an AI advisor to the United Nations and a lecturer at UC Irvine, is developing systems to train a computer to review reams of data and come to a predictive conclusion.

The idea is not to replace fire behavior analysts and jettison their decades of fireline experience, Sahota said, but to augment their work — and, mostly, to move much faster.

“We can crunch billions of different data points in near real time, in seconds,” he said. “The challenge is, what’s the right data? We may think there are seven variables that go into a wildfire, for example. AI may come back saying there are thousands.”

In order for their information to be useful, computers have to be taught: What’s the difference between a Boy Scout campfire and a wildfire? How to distinguish between an arsonist starting a fire and a firefighter setting a backfire with a drip torch?

Despite the dizzying speed at which devices have been employed on the modern fireline, most fire behavior computer models are still based on algorithms devised by Mark Finney, a revered figure in the field of fire science.

Working from the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in Montana, Finney has studied fire behavior through observation and, especially, by starting all manner of fires in combustion chambers and in the field. In another lab in Missoula, scientists bake all types of wood in special ovens to determine how fuels burn at different moisture levels.

Still, Finney is unimpressed by much of the sophisticated technology brought to bear on wildfires as they burn. He said it provides only an illusion of control.

“Once you are in a position to have to fight these extreme fires, you’ve already lost,” he said. “Don’t let anybody kid you, we do not suppress these fires, we don’t control them. We wait for the weather.”

The Missoula research group developed the National Fire Danger Rating System in 1972, which is still in place today. Among the fire behavior tools Finney designed is the FARSITE system, a simulation of fire growth invaluable to frontline fire bosses.

Finney and colleagues are working on a next-generation version of the behavior prediction system, which is now undergoing real-world tests.

“This equation has an awful lot of assumptions in it,” he said. “We’re getting there. Nature is a lot more complicated. There are still a number of mysteries on fire behavior. We don’t have a road map to follow that tells us that this is good enough.”

By far the best use of the predictive tools that he and others have developed is to learn how to avoid firestarts, he said, by thinning and clearing forests to reduce threat.

“I would love to tell you that the key to solving these problems is more research. But if we just stopped doing research and just use what we know, we’d be a lot better off.”

Still, research about fire behavior races on, driven by the belief that you can’t fight an enemy you don’t understand.

Mike Koontz is a postdoc researcher at University of Colorado Boulder who leads a project focusing on better understanding of California's megafires to provide fire bosses the best information to fight fires. Photo by Aaron Ontivaeroz for CalMatters

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Aaron Ontivaeroz

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CalMatters

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Mike Koontz is on the frontlines of that battle, tucked into a semicircle of supercomputers. Koontz leads a team of researchers in Boulder, Colo., studying a new, volatile and compelling topic: California megafires.

“We began to see a clear uptick in extreme fire behavior in California since the 2000s,” said Koontz, a postdoctoral researcher with the Earth Lab at University of Colorado Boulder. “We keyed in on fires that moved quickly and blew up over a short period of time.” California is a trove of extreme fires, he said.

Koontz is using supercomputers to scrape databases, maps and satellite images and apply the data to an analytical framework of his devising. The team tracks significant fires that grow unexpectedly, and layers in weather conditions, topography, fire spread rates and other factors.

What comes out is a rough sketch of the elements driving California’s fires to grow so large. The next hurdle is to get the information quickly into the hands of fire commanders, Koontz said.

The goal: if not a new bible for fighting fires, at least an updated playbook.

Los Angeles County will begin sending mail-in ballots starting this Thursday ahead of the Nov. 3 elections. Counties across the state have until next Monday, Oct. 5, to begin mailing out ballots.

In the June primary, nearly 82% of the total ballots cast in L.A. County were through vote-by-mail ballots.

State and local officials are encouraging people to vote early.

When can I turn in my ballot?

L.A. County elections officials say voters can turn in their ballots by mail as soon as they receive them. No postage is necessary.

They can also turn them in starting this week at official dropboxes across the county, which are often found at parks, community centers or libraries.

Voters can also turn them in or vote in person at the county’s Vote Centers, which L.A. County officials say will start to open on Oct. 24. Officials say all Vote Centers will be open by Halloween.

What about in Orange County?

Orange County officials say U.S. Postal Service officials are scheduled to pick up about 1.9 million ballots from the county elections office on Saturday and start delivering them on Monday, Oct. 5.

The Trump administration has tried to restrict mail-in ballots. Will my ballot be affected?

The California Secretary of State’s office says nothing has currently changed. The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month issued an injunction on President Trump’s executive order requiring states to turn in lists of voters and ordering the USPS to send mail-in ballots to the people on the approved lists.

"Voters will be able to cast their ballots without uncertainty, without hesitation, and without fear that their voices will be questioned or their ballots rejected," said Secretary of State Shirley Weber.

Los Angeles County is reporting the highest number of rabid bats on record, a to-date total of 69, officials said.

This year’s rabid bat count has already matched 2025’s total, according to the L.A. County Department of Public Health, which released the count Monday, marking World Rabies Day.

Health officials emphasized that rabid bats have been found all over the county "from suburban areas such as the San Fernando Valley to urban areas like downtown Los Angeles, in office buildings, parks, schools, businesses, and residential backyards."

That said, a large share of rabid bats — 68% of the 69 found so far — were in the Santa Clarita Valley, and they were mainly canyon bats, which are common in California.

When to be on high alert

Officials warned that a third of human encounters with rabid bats happened indoors, where the risk of exposure to the virus is higher.

Bat bites are small and can be hard to detect. Rabies can also be spread through scratches or other transfers of saliva.

“If you find a bat indoors or think you may have had contact with one, contact your medical provider or Public Health right away,” Dr. Muntu Davis, a Los Angeles County Health officer, said in a statement. “And remember, never touch a bat or any wild animals. Immediately report any bat found indoors, or outdoors if it appears sick, active during the day, unable to fly, or dead, to your local animal control.”

Who to call

Veterinary Public Health

Phone: 213-288-7060
Email: vet@ph.lacounty.gov
Website: publichealth.lacounty.gov/vet

*Call 211 to find your local animal control

What to know about rabies

Rabies in humans is treatable with a series of vaccines. Rabies is always fatal in animals, the county said in a release, so vaccinate your pets.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law Sunday that tightens building rules for sites that store explosive chemicals, responding to an Orange County chemical incident that forced thousands of residents to evacuate Memorial Day weekend.

The law also adds the chemical methyl methacrylate to a state program that aims to prevent chemical disasters.

In May, CalMatters reported that California’s toughest accidental-release prevention rules do not cover the chemical in the tank at GKN Aerospace, a company that makes cockpits and windshields in Garden Grove. Weeks later Democratic state Sen. Tom Umberg of Santa Ana amended an existing bill with language that addressed that gap. Assembly committee and floor analyses noted CalMatters’ reporting. 

Had the chemical exploded, it “would have been perhaps the greatest catastrophe, certainly in the last several decades in California,” Umberg said at a June Assembly hearing.

Umberg’s original proposal would have set stronger standards for more types of explosive chemicals, but legislators narrowed it significantly in last-minute negotiations.

The final law bars building new facilities near homes and schools and requires backup cooling systems. It also strips an exemption from environmental review that facilities storing methyl methacrylate previously qualified for.

Garden Grove advocates call the bill a good step, but say it offers the community little immediate recourse, especially with GKN Aerospace planning to reopen by the end of September.

The law’s siting requirements apply to new facilities, not to existing ones like GKN’s Garden Grove plant.

Mai Do, research and policy manager for the Orange County advocacy group Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice, said she hopes the state will do more to address the threat of toxic chemicals at existing facilities.

“This is a much larger fight than just what's happened in Garden Grove,” Do said. “What we see in terms of the Lineage fire and other industrial crises is that this is a problem that is affecting a lot of different communities”

In an interview with CalMatters, Umberg said the bill reflected a balancing act. “This is a net benefit for the state, a net benefit for the community,” he said.

Stronger rules for new facilities, not existing ones

Over Memorial Day weekend, residents learned of a problem with a tank storing methyl methacrylate at the GKN Aerospace facility. A crack in the tank released pressure and, along with efforts by emergency responders, averted disaster, but questions remained about what went wrong.

CalMatters reported in May that methyl methacrylate and other chemicals that could explode under certain conditions falls outside the California Accidental Release Program, which requires facilities to maintain detailed plans for preventing or responding to chemical leaks or explosions.

Rachel Tochterman, a spokesperson for Sen. Umberg, said the senator took note and initially proposed incorporating a broader category of reactive chemicals into the program.

But industry groups opposed the plan, arguing it was too broad without clearer evidence.

Dawn Koepke, a lobbyist for the California Manufacturers and Technology Association and the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance, said she does not believe a regulatory gap exists that would justify incorporating more chemicals into the state’s accidental release regimen.

Facilities storing toxic chemicals are already heavily regulated under other federal and state laws, she said, including a requirement for plans to protect people from chemical releases.

Koepke said she worried that "jumping to conclusions and over-regulating" could affect "a wider array of facilities."

Tim Shestek, a lobbyist representing the American Chemistry Council and other groups, said in an email that Umberg’s original proposal would have affected “far more facilities, substances and sectors than were in the original scope.”

After amendments on the next-to-last day of the legislative session, nine industry groups stopped lobbying against the bill.

Most provisions of the law only apply to methyl methacrylate — the chemical involved in the Garden Grove incident. The bill adds it to the state’s accidental release program, requires facilities to maintain prevention and emergency-response plans, and closes the environmental-review exemption for new sites where the chemical is present.

Scrapped from the bill: a requirement to map reactive-chemical sites in CalEnviroScreen, a state program that identifies polluted communities.

GKN Aerospace plans to reopen 

Steve Carlin, senior vice president for GKN Aerospace programs, said the company has been working with regulators and independent experts “to safely reset the remainder of the facility with the appropriate oversight” work that has included inspections, upgrades to safety equipment, and additional monitoring. The company plans to reopen in the next few days.

The company also announced an additional $100 million program to pay residents and businesses that lost money during evacuations.

Lisa Fu, director of the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, a worker-safety group, wants California to regulate hazardous chemicals more broadly.

“It's just unfortunate that it's a piecemeal thing,” said Lisa Fu, director of the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative. “Is it worth it to go piece by piece in terms of trying to ban certain chemicals? It makes the work harder for us, and you can see who's benefiting and who's not.”

Newsom also signed a pair of bills in response to the Lineage fire, a June cold storage fire in Los Angeles. The fire briefly prompted a shelter-in-place order over fears that toxic anhydrous ammonia had been released into the air.

The new laws raise the fines agencies can levy on companies that endanger health and safety. They also bar building permits for cold storage facilities that lack contingency funds or insurance to help communities in emergencies.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

California is now the second state to recognize the two main Muslim holidays as state holidays.

Eid ul Fitr is the festival marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, and Eid ul Adha is the festival honoring Abraham or Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son as a mark of his devotion to God. They join a state holiday list that also includes Lunar New Year and Diwali.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the change into law Monday. Washington first recognized the holidays in 2025.

Oussama Mokeddem, legislative and government affairs director at the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told LAist the signing day is  “an exciting day for the California Muslim community and a big day for the American Muslim community at large.”

Muslims follow the lunar calendar, so the dates of the two festivals vary each year. Next year, Eid ul Fitr will likely fall on March 10 and Eid ul Adha on May 17.

Why it's important to Californians

The holiday recognition comes at a time when the community is facing “unwarranted and unjustified criticism,” Mokeddem said, which he cited as a reason for a May 2026 attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego. A recent Pew study also found that 42% of Americans believe Muslim Americans have a negative impact on the country.

Adam Khaja, an 11th grader at Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District, said the holiday recognition signals that  "you don't have to give up an important part of your identity to fully participate in Californian society."

" For a long time, immigrant and minority communities have sometimes felt pressure to leave parts of their identity at home in order to fit into American educational or industrial institutions," he said.

What does the holiday recognition mean?

California is home to more than 1 million Muslims, and with this law, state employees can use existing paid time off to celebrate the two holidays.

And for students in K-12 public schools, Mokeddem said the law does not mandate statewide time off, but local school districts can declare a district-wide day off if enough community members bring it up as a need.

He added that students can also cite state law when they are absent from school to celebrate the holiday.

Khaja said he will be advocating for his school district to give a district-wide day off.

"Eid has always been a huge part of our lives, but I think that the school calendar and district policies haven't always reflected that," he said.

He hopes his students will not be put in a situation now "to choose between going to school or fully participating in one of the most important days of their faith."

Muslim Women Professionals, a nonprofit, has templates on how to advocate for time off to celebrate Eid ul Fitr and Eid ul Adha.