California wildfire season hits record, more damage expected.
Smoke from California wildfires suffocated people on the East Coast. The flames engulfed a Gold Rush-era city. The burned acreage would dwarf the state of Rhode Island. Images of houses engulfed in flames and mountains glowing like lava would make it easy to conclude that the Golden State is a burnt-black landscape.
Rarely so, but the frightening truth is that the worst is yet to come.
California has already exceeded the acreage burned at this point last year, which set the record. It is now entering a period when powerful winds have often caused the deadliest fires.
“Here we are—it’s not the end of August and the size and distribution and the destruction of the summer 2021 wildfires don’t bode well for the next months,” said Bill Devrell, a University of Southern California history professor who is responsible for the fires. teach about. West. “The pattern suggested over the past two decades in the West is deeply disturbing and worrying: hotter, bigger, more fire.”
More than a dozen large wildfires are burning in California grass, brush, and forest, which is exceptionally dry with the prospect of a two-year drought caused by climate change.
The fires, mainly in the northern part of the state, have burned more than 1 million acres, or 2,000 square miles (5,180 square kilometers).
Firefighters are seeing extreme fire behavior as embers carried for miles by gusts are igniting ripe vegetation to burn in rough landscapes where it’s difficult to attack or build perimeters to stop it spreading.
The Dixie Fire, currently the largest burning and the second largest on record, decimated the historic city of Greenville and threatened thousands of homes about 175 miles (282 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco. The Caldor fire, burning about 100 miles (161 kilometers) to the south, has raged since Saturday, burning parts of the village of Grizzly Flat and chewing through dense forest.
John Hawkins, a retired fire chief of state and now a wildland fire consultant, said he had never seen such explosive fire behavior in 58 fire seasons.
A fire 50 years ago that burned 100 homes and killed two people near Yosemite National Park, once held the record for the fastest expansion, covering about 31 square miles (80 square kilometers) in two hours. But that kind of spread is becoming more common today.
“The 1961 Harlow Fire was one of a kind in its day,” Hawkins said. “It’s not one of a kind as we compare it today, it’s one after the other. Something has changed.”
Hawkins said he saw similar rapid growth in the Caldor Fire.
The dramatic time-lapse video shows a giant feather rising above the dense forest. The pillar rose and black smoke spread across the sky before the cloud burst into flames hundreds of feet into the sky.
“It was not a slow deal,” Hawkins said. “When you see one of them grow into heavy wood so fast and there are already over a dozen fires in California, it doesn’t take long to light your lightbulb or ring your bell. “
The state’s ten largest and 13 of the top 20 most devastating wildfires have burned in the past four years.
The largest of those fires, the August Complex, a cluster of electrically sparking flames that merged, began a year earlier this week. The deadliest and most devastating, the Camp Fire, killed 85 people and destroyed nearly 19,000 buildings in November 2018.
In the past, wildfires have been dominant in late summer and in the fall fires have burned in chaparral and woodlands driven by powerful dry winds created by high pressure over the Great Basin, said Malcolm North, a researcher with the US Forest Service.
Offshore winds, known as the Diablos in Northern California and the Santa Anas in Southern California, have typically driven some of the worst blizzards as they shed moisture vegetation and gain momentum as they travel through mountain passes and canyons. Lets squeeze through, get hot and even dry.
Precarious inferno such as the Creek Fire last year, the fifth largest ever, can be attributed to the 2012-16 drought. It is estimated that more than 100 million trees have been killed in the Sierra Nevada, the state’s largest mountain range, and many are in the midst of a fire, North said.
North was a co-author of a 2018 scientific paper that predicted Sierra wildfires could be fueled by the intensity of flames in Dresden, Germany and Tokyo during World War II.
“I think that’s what we’re seeing,” North said. “The current models we have for how a fire is going to behave don’t cover it because it’s off the charts. It’s dangerous for firefighters and it’s hard to predict what it’s going to do.”
North and others said they worry about firefighters who have been working on the Dixie Fire for more than a month and move from one fire to another.
After the Caldor fire broke out earlier this week, staff from the Dixie Fire were sent there on Wednesday.
We’re hoping to begin building a control line around the fire as the winds were predicted to die down.
Any new blaze, like Wednesday’s French fire near Isabella Lake, 110 miles (177 kilometers) north of Los Angeles, could disrupt those efforts by diverting firefighters, trucks and water- and retardant-dropping aircraft.
Those crews also take time to reposition, which takes time for the new Blaze to move on.
“Every time someone new starts it’s like going to Toys R Us on Christmas Eve,” Hawkins said.
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