California wildfires among largest in history as
state braces for more dry lightning
Forecasters issued a warning for Sunday morning
through Monday night
Blazes have burned more than 900,000 acres over seven
days
Area bigger than Rhode Island burns as resources
stretched
Farmworkers pick pay over health despite smoke-filled
air
Maanvi
Singh and Oliver Milman
Sat 22 Aug
2020 22.53 BSTFirst published on Sat 22 Aug 2020 11.54 BST
Already
battling some of the largest wildfires on record, California is bracing for dry
lightning and gusty winds that threaten to start more fire, and stoke the
existing blazes.
The state
has already requested help from Australia and Canada to help contain the fires
, which have displaced more than 100,000 people and killed six and incinerated
hundreds of homes. The blazes were sparked by an unusual barrage of lightning
and stoked by a searing, persistent heatwave last week. Although cooler, more
humid weather overnight helped firefighters make ground,
“we are not
out of the woods”, said Cal Fire Unit chief Shana Jones on Saturday. “Upcoming
predicted weather is not in our favor.”
The state’s
governor, Gavin Newsom, said the fires,which have chewed through more than
991,000 acres over seven days, “are stretching our resources, our personnel”,
requiring help from other states and countries.
Two fires,
the LNU Lightning Complex and the SCU Lightning Complex, now rank as the second
and third-largest on record.
“We simply
haven’t seen anything like this in many, many years,” said Newsom, who has requested
assistance from what he called “the world’s best wildfire-fighters” in
Australia, a country that itself experienced enormous wildfires earlier this
year.
Help from
Canada and 10 other US states is also heading to California.
Some 560
wildfires were burning throughout the state on Saturday. Many were small and
remote but the bulk of the damage was from three clusters ravaging forest and
rural areas in the wine country and San Francisco Bay Area.
Those
complexes, consisting of dozens of fires, exploded in size on Friday.
The LNU
Lightning Complex, a cluster of fires in the north of the state, had engulfed
314,207 acres across Napa, Lake, Solano and Sonoma counties, placing it behind
only the Mendocino Complex fire of 2018, which scorched about 459,000 acres, in
the state’s fire records dating back to 1932. The SCU Lightning Complex,
another cluster encompassing parts of several Bay Area counties, is the state’s
third-largest recorded, having spread across more than 291,900 acres.
“What’s
remarkable is that these fires are very explosive and they’re growing so
quickly,” Crystal Kolden, a fire scientist at UC Merced, told the Guardian.
Fires across the state are “becoming more frequent and more extreme with
climate change”, she noted.
Forecasters
have warned that things could get even dicier, issuing a red flag warning for
Sundaymorning through Monday night. The National Weather Service warned of the
potential for dry thunderstorms, noting that “lightning and gusty, erratic
winds around storms will be the main threat”. The storms could not only start
new fires, but also stoke the flames already burning through the state.
More than
12,000 personnel were fighting fires around the state, aided by helicopters and
fixed-wing aircraft. By Friday, the state’s fire agency, Cal Fire, had called
out 96% of available fire engines.
Among those
beating back the flames are more than 1,300 incarcerated firefighters who have
been entrusted with the backbreaking work of clearing the fire-fueling
vegetation in exchange for low wages and reduced sentences. Their ranks have
been diminished by devastating Covid-19 outbreaks in California prisons.
“Their
labor has been exploited for decades,” Romarilyn Ralston, who leads Project
Rebound, a California State University program that supports formerly
incarcerated students, recently told the Guardian. “People are injured,
sometimes not fully prepared for fighting a wildland fire.”
This week,
the number of large fires was “staggering” and had put “tremendous strain” on
resources not just in California, but throughout western states, said Sean
Kavanaugh, Cal Fire incident commander. Nevada and Arizona, for example,
battled sizable blazes this week as a heatwave swept the west.
In the
Santa Cruz mountains south of San Francisco, about 1,000 firefighters were
battling a fire 10 times the size they typically would cover, said Dan Olsen, a
Cal Fire spokesman.
Officials
noted that the LNU fires were the state’s biggest priority, but whereas about
5,000 firefighters were deployed to the Mendocino complex fire in 2018, only
1,400 were available to battle the largest of the blazes currently burning
California.
Three
bodies were found on Thursday in a burned home in Napa county, said Henry
Wofford, a sheriff’s spokesman.
A man died
in neighboring Solano county, and a Pacific Gas & Electric utility worker
was found dead in a vehicle in the Vacaville area. Also on Wednesday, a
helicopter pilot died in a crash while dropping water on a blaze in Fresno
county.
Smoke and
ash billowing from the fires has fouled the air throughout the San Francisco
Bay area and along California’s scenic central coast. Health officials, who
have been advising residents that outdoor spaces are safer than indoors amid
the coronavirus pandemic, said this week to stay inside.
Officials
warned that air pollution, which has billowed all the way over to the Great
Plains in the middle of the country, will render those with respiratory
conditions, who face an elevated risk of complications from Covid-19, doubly
vulnerable. Growing evidence also suggests that pollution might aggravate the
spread of the virus, or worsen its toll.
The fires
have also strained the state’s public health resources, already stretched by
the struggle to contain a recent surge in coronavirus cases. And those who have
been forced to flee their homes have had to weigh the risks of staying with
friends and family, or at evacuation centers – where they risk exposure to the
virus.
Agencies contributed reporting
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