Firefighters battling the second largest wildfire in California history faced a return of fire-friendly weather, as the thick smoke that held down winds and temperatures from the scenic forestlands picked up.
The changing weather conditions near the Dixie fire, which is burning the state’s far north, concerned firefighters working in unprecedented conditions to protect thousands of threatened homes in rural communities of the Sierra Nevada.
“The live trees that are out there now have a lower fuel moisture than you would find when you go to a hardware store or a lumber yard and get that piece of lumber that’s kiln dried,” Mark Brunton, operations section chief for the California department of forestry and fire protection, said in an online briefing Sunday morning.
“It’s that dry, so it doesn’t take much for any sort of embers, sparks or small flaming front to get that going.”
Fueled by strong winds and bone-dry vegetation, the Dixie fire incinerated much of the mountain town of Greenville on Wednesday and Thursday, destroying 370 homes and structures and threatening nearly 14,000 buildings in the northern Sierra Nevada. Greenville, which was partially destroyed by an 1881 fire, dates to California’s Gold Rush era and has some buildings more than a century old. A gas station, hotel and hardware store were among the structures destroyed in the quiet, close-knit community of 1,000 people.
The fire, named for the road where it started nearly four weeks ago, grew to an area of 765 sq miles (1,980 sq km) by Sunday evening and was just 21% contained, according to the California department of forestry and fire protection. It grew by more than 40 sq miles Sunday and in about a month has scorched an area more than twice the size of New York City.
The winds weren’t expected to reach the ferocious speeds that helped the fire explode in size last week. But with smoke clearing out on eastern portions of the fire, crews that had been directly attacking the front lines would be forced to retreat and build containment lines farther back, said Dan McKeague, a fire information officer from the US Forest Service.
On the plus side, better visibility should allow planes and helicopters to return to the firefight and make it safer for ground crews to maneuver. “As soon as that air clears, we can fly again,” McKeague said.
Crews have constructed 465 miles (748 km) of line around the giant blaze, Chris Waters, deputy incident commander, said. That’s about the distance from the central California city of Chico to Los Angeles. But officials are only confident that about 20% of the line is secure, he said.
“Every bit of that line needs to be constructed, staffed, mopped up and actually put to bed before we can call this fire fully contained,” Waters said during Saturday evening’s incident briefing.
Strong winds contributed to increased fire activity Sunday. But the weather was expected to settle a bit starting Monday before peaking again with high temperatures mid-week.
“Fire behavior is expected to increase with clear air and a warming trend that is forecasted to peak mid-week,” Cal Fire said.
Damage reports are preliminary because assessment teams can’t get into many areas, officials said.
The blaze became the largest single fire in California’s recorded history, surpassing last year’s Creek fire in the Central Valley, and the second largest in the state’s history if fires that merged are included in the count. The fire is about half the size of the August complex, a series of lightning-sparked 2020 fires across seven counties that grew to more than 1m acres and became the first “gigafire”. Those fires were fought together and state officials consider the complex California’s largest wildfire overall.
The fire’s cause was under investigation. The embattled utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) has said it may have been sparked when a tree fell on one of its power lines. A federal judge ordered PG&E on Friday to give details by 16 August about the equipment and vegetation where the fire started. PG&E equipment has caused multiple fires in recent years and the utility pleaded guilty to more than 80 counts of involuntary manslaughter for its role in sparking the 2018 Camp fire.
Cooler temperatures and higher humidity slowed the spread of the fire, and temperatures topped 90F (32C) instead of the triple-digit highs recorded earlier in the week.
But the blaze and its neighboring fires, within several hundred miles of each other, posed an ongoing threat.
The California governor, Gavin Newsom, surveyed the damage in Greenville Saturday. “These are climate-induced wildfires and we have to acknowledge that we have the capacity in not just the state but in this country to solve this,” Newsom said on CNN.
Heat waves and historic drought tied to climate change have made wildfires harder to fight in the American west. Scientists have said climate change has made the region much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.
More than 8,500 firefighters are battling wildfires across the state. North-west of the Dixie fire in the Shasta-Trinity national forest, hundreds of homes remained threatened by the McFarland and Monument fires, which continued growing. About a quarter of the McFarland fire was contained and about 3% of the Monument fire was contained.
California’s fire season is on track to surpass last year’s season, which was the worst fire season in recent recorded state history.
Since the start of the year, more than 6,000 blazes have destroyed more than 1,260 sq miles (3,260 sq km) of land, more than triple the losses for the same period in 2020, according to state fire figures.
California’s raging wildfires were among 107 large fires burning across 14 states, mostly in the west, where historic drought conditions have left lands parched and ripe for ignition.
