Firefighters battle California’s largest wildfire with temperatures due to rise | US wildfires
Firefighters battled fiercely to hold on the progress made in past days against California’s largest wildfire, before temperatures are set to warm later this week.
Authorities said the Park fire is continuing to rage at intense speeds in rugged terrain outside the university town of Chico, and is threatening to spread to two other counties.
Fire crews managed to reach 18% containment in recent days, and evacuation orders in some communities have been lifted.
Cooler weather has helped firefighters stop the blaze’s path near some communities such as Forest Ranch, where some people began returning to unscathed homes on Tuesday.
Christopher and Anita Angeloni have lived in the community of 1,600 for 23 years and have had to evacuate several times due to wildfires, they said, including during the 2018 Camp fire that killed 85 people and decimated the town of Paradise, about 8 miles (13km) south.
Christopher Angeloni said he constantly worked on creating defensible space around his home and was happy to return home nearly a week after evacuating to see his hard work had paid off.
“We were prepared to possibly lose everything,” he said.
Anita Angeloni said it had been a stressful week.
“We have not been sleeping enough, very tense, praying all the time, teary eyes,” she said. “But we’re here. We’ll see for how long.”
The fire, now the fifth largest in the state’s recorded history, had scorched 386,764 acres by late Tuesday evening, according to Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency. More than 270 structures have been destroyed, and about 8,200 remain threatened.
The fire started last Wednesday after authorities say a man pushed a burning car down a ravine in Chico. The suspect, Ronnie Dean Stout II, was charged with arson on Monday. His public defender, Nicole Diamond, said in an email she had no comment.
Meanwhile in southern California, people in Kern and Tulare counties were ordered to evacuate because of a fire sweeping through the Sequoia national forest. That fire, which has been dubbed the Borel fire, scorched through almost the entirety of the historic mining town of Havilah, officials said.
The fires burning throughout California have overwhelmed the state’s firefighting capacity and outside help has started to arrive, officials said. The California governor, Gavin Newsom, thanked his Texas counterpart, Gregg Abbott, on Tuesday for sending more than two dozen fire engines to help combat the Park fire this week.
It has been a brutal wildfire season in the US west this year, with more than 100 large active wildfires burning across the country. Typically, the most intense period in the US wildfire season comes in late August.
In Oregon, wildfires have burnt more than 1m acres in recent weeks. The largest of them, the Durkee fire, has scorched nearly 285,000 acres. Firefighters there said cooler weather had allowed them to make significant progress in battling the conflagrations.
In Colorado, a wildfire near the city of Loveland in Colorado’s Rocky mountains grew to more than 5,000 acres by Tuesday evening as more homes were placed under mandatory evacuation orders and a looming column of smoke could be seen for miles around.
Some of the worst fires have sent smoke billowing for hundreds of miles around them, blanketing cities like Boise, Idaho, and Calgary, Canada, with poor-quality air. Wildfire smoke is known to have strong adverse health effects. Smoky skies have been linked to spikes in hospital admissions and ambulance calls for conditions such as asthma. For people who have cardiovascular problems, the risk of cardiac arrest rises 70% during days with heavy smoke. A recent study in California attributed more than 50,000 premature deaths to wildfire smoke exposure.
Western states have spent weeks in the grip of back-to-back heatwaves, some with record-breaking triple-digit temperatures, compounding the risk of new ignitions as a parched landscape is primed to burn.
Fire crews are bracing for warm temperatures set to return to California later this week. “Above average” temperatures in many areas, in combination with possible lightning outbreaks and occasionally breezy winds, may spell trouble for firefighters, said the climate scientist Daniel Swain on X.
Source link