With nearly 4,900 firefighters mobilized, 33 helicopters, 400 trucks and numerous Canadairs, California firefighters continued their fierce fight Monday against the largest megafire 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 Golden 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 more than 26,000 people were still under evacuation orders as of Monday afternoon, according to a CalFire spokesperson.
The authorities are calling for the greatest caution, given a situation that could deteriorate at any time.
“This fire is extremely volatile and unpredictable,” Tehama County Sheriff Dave Kain said at a news briefing Monday. “We’ve seen many places that we thought were safe become engulfed in flames again.”
This megafire, which destroyed more than a hundred buildings, is impressive: it progressed at the speed of a man walking for the first 48 hours, and generated spectacular clouds of smoke, as well as a sort of fire tornado.
Heat waves
The rapid spread of the flames was notably enabled by the repeated heat waves that have hit California and the American West since the beginning of June.
” The vegetation […] “It’s still super, super dry, parched from 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.
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 a few dozen kilometers from the flames. The alerts concerning it were lifted Monday afternoon, but the situation remains fluid.
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. The suspect, a 42-year-old man with a long criminal record, appeared in court on Monday to be formally charged. He was seen Wednesday pushing a “burning car into a ravine,” according to the local prosecutor’s office.
The United States is currently battling about 100 large wildfires, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. They are mainly ravaging the western part of the country, including Oregon, where an airplane pilot fighting a fire died last week.
The resulting smoke prompted weather services to issue air quality alerts in many locations across the region.
In California, another fire in the center of the state nearly burned the small village of Havilah this weekend, 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, scientists say.