(Los Angeles) With nearly 4,900 firefighters mobilized, 33 helicopters, 400 trucks and numerous Canadairs, California firefighters continued their fierce fight Monday against the largest fire of the year, which has already burned an area larger than the city of Los Angeles.
The “Park Fire” has been raging since Wednesday in the northern part of the state, in a rural region three hours drive northeast of San Francisco. It has now ravaged almost 1,500 km2according to the CalFire agency, making it one of the largest fires in California history.
There are no casualties to report so far, and the firefighters benefited from a slight drop in temperatures this weekend, which allowed them to make some progress: the fire is “12%” under control.
But around 4,200 people are still under evacuation orders, and authorities are calling for extreme caution as the situation could deteriorate at any time.
PHOTO LOREN ELLIOTT, THE NEW YORK TIMES
With nearly 4,900 firefighters mobilized, 33 helicopters, 400 trucks and numerous Canadairs, California firefighters continued their fierce fight against the largest fire of the year on Monday.
“We ask the public to continue to be diligent and prepared [à partir] because of the severity of the fire,” CalFire insisted.
The fire was impressive: it progressed at the speed of a man walking for the first 48 hours, and generated clouds of smoke sculpted like atomic mushrooms, as well as a mini-tornado of fire.
Heat waves
The rapid spread of the fire was notably enabled by the repeated heat waves that have affected California and the American West since the beginning of June.
” The vegetation […] “It’s still super, super dry, dried out by a month of record heat,” Daniel Swain, an extreme events specialist at UCLA, said Sunday.
And while the Sierra Nevada foothills burn regularly, the specific forests this fire is targeting are “places that haven’t had a fire in decades,” he added. So there’s plenty of fuel for the flames.
PHOTO LOREN ELLIOTT, THE NEW YORK TIMES
The California Conservation Corps and CalFire personnel are working to contain the Park Fire, along Highway 32 northeast of Chico, California.
Despite the enormous resources deployed by California, an expert in fighting fires, “the technology remains insufficient to deal with a fire of such magnitude,” he said.
This huge wildfire brings back bad memories: the town of Paradise, where 85 people died in 2018 in the deadliest fire in California history, is only about twenty kilometers from the flames. It is on alert and its residents must prepare for any eventuality.
In forested villages under evacuation orders, some residents are choosing to stay until the last minute. Like Justin Freese, who is spreading his water hoses around his two-story house, lost in the woods.
“I am prepared, but I am not stupid,” the forty-year-old assured the New York Times. “If there’s a 100-foot wall of flames, I’m not going to stand there and get burned.”
Hundreds of fires in the United States
The fire was caused by arson, according to authorities. A 42-year-old man was placed in pretrial detention Thursday morning after being seen pushing a “burning car into a ravine,” according to local prosecutors.
The United States is currently battling about 100 large wildfires, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. They are mainly ravaging the West of the country, particularly in Oregon, where an airplane pilot fighting a fire died last week.
The smoke they generate has prompted weather services to issue quality alerts in many places in the region.
In California, another fire broke out over the weekend in the center of the state and almost completely destroyed the small village of Havilah, without causing any casualties. The place was known as a mining outpost, a relic of the gold rush.
Repeated heat waves are a marker of global warming linked to climate change caused by humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels, scientists say.