Federal officials described them as “fires of hell”, a “holocaust” that burned 775,000 acres of wood and chapel and produced millennial clouds that resembled a nuclear bomb blast.
It was the Victory of ’87, when two weeks of dry lightning strikes in late August and early September attracted thousands of firefighters in Northern California and Oregon, drawing an army of 19,000 arsonists.
In 1999, hundreds of lightning caused fires in the Big Sur region and the north of the state merged into two of the nation’s top leaflets that year.
Over a period of 33 hours in June of 2008, more than 5,000 lightning strikes ignited approximately 1,000 fires across Northern California, the Sierra Nevada and the Central Coast.
This month’s explosion of lightning strikes in the Bay Area will undoubtedly go down in the record books as the Siege of 2020. In the span of a week, some of them have joined forces to fight the second and third largest wildfires. to form in modern state history.
But large fires ignited by storms that swept the skies with thousands of lightning bolts are nothing new.
Although California’s most devastating wildfires are often caused by humans as equipment during high winds, many of the state’s largest recordings are recorded with lightning strikes in the north as the Central Coast.
Firefighters protect a home in the Berryessa Estates neighborhood of unincorporated Napa County, California, as the LNU Lightning Complex fires.
(Noah Berger / Associated Press)
As of Saturday morning, the LNU Lightning Complex fire had engulfed more than 300,000 acres in the Napa-Sonoma County area, making it the state’s second-largest state after the 2018 man-caused Mendocino Complex fire.
On about 292,000 hectares, the SCU complex fire is the third largest in the East Bay region.
The enormous volume of lightning strikes – about 12,000 – and the number of ignitions – 585 to date – make it impossible for firefighters to cover much of the start before assembling, forming monsters that can burn weeks or even months before. they die out.
There will probably be more to come, given the forecasts of thunder, dry lightning and wind gusts for the Bay Area on Sunday and Monday.
Although the magnitude of last week’s dry lightning strikes seems exceptional, Cindy Palmer, a meteorologist in the Bay Area office of the National Weather Service, said it was not so unusual.
“I think people have short memories,” she said.
Two colliding water systems – tropical moisture from the south and a high-pressure reef from the east – produce thunderstorms that spew lightning but little rain. Last weekend, Palmer said, lightning struck in one place 10 miles from the nearest precipitation.
The moisture in storm systems is in the higher atmosphere, and much of it evaporates before it reaches the earth’s surface.
“It’s not that these storms are not raining,” Palmer said. “It’s that they’re not producing enough rain to stop a fire from starting.”
This is especially true after an exceptionally dry winter in Northern California, and a heat wave that pervaded wild vegetation.
Lightning strikes are relatively rare off the coast of Southern California. But they occur during the summer season in the mountains and deserts.
A recent lightning strike sparked the Dome fire, which burned stands of Joshua trees in the Mojave National Preserve.
When Jon Keeley, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and research scientist Alexandra Syphard analyzed California wildfire ignitions, they found that lightning was the cause of the majority of fires in forests in Northern California, but suggested less than one quarter of the start in Southern The four national forests of California.
Southland’s worst wildfires are driven by Santa Ana winds – and are almost always caused by people, downed powerlines or equipment sparks.
