As firefighters put out the huge fires that burned through Northern California, thousands of evacuees began returning home.
Many residents in the region are facing uncertain, troubled days ahead as officials assess damage from the fires, which killed at least seven people, burned more than 1.2m acres and destroyed nearly 2,000 homes and structures.
An onslaught of calm, cool weather and humidity in recent days has broken the prolonged, scorching heatwave and frantic dry lightning storm that repelled some of the biggest burns on record in California.
“We’re starting to see a lot of big progress,” said Mark Brunton, a battalion commander with Cal Fire, the state fire department. Crews were able to hold a line against the northern edge of the CZU Lightning Complex fire, which threatened to play out in Silicon Valley, he said at a press conference early Thursday morning. “As for the operation to completely extinguish it, it is a slow, arduous process,” he said.
Although climate scientists and firefighters “know for a long time” that fires in California are becoming more and more destructive due to climate change, the scale and size of current flames are “surprising,” said Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
“It’s shocking to see the number of fires at one time – just hundreds,” Field told the Guardian. “And it’s shocking to see the fires grow to more than a million acres. This is a truly gigantic event. ”
Despite successes in containing the flames in that region, they grew over 200 acres at night and searched crews for two men who were missing. Firefighters and paramedics are clearing up clutter to make room for those who come home.
However, many were left everywhere to return.
Sarah Fulop-Furlano, 41, had evacuated with her husband and three children almost two weeks ago, not long after she saw the first flashes of lightning behind the red trees that stood near the family home in a distant community called Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
She assumed they would soon be back with her cat, Mama Kitty and her five hens. As the fire moved fiercely on the mountainside, it became increasingly clear that this would not be the case.
“It got really big and out of control really fast,” Fulop-Furlano said of the fire. When her husband drove to the house in one last attempt to save what he could, the sky glowed orange and he felt the penetrating heat of the fire.
‘It was just sad. There was no sound – no birds, no wild animals, nothing, ‘said Fulop-Furlano. As he stood thinking about what he could still save, a gust of wind blew a children’s toy across the driveway, and he knew the flames were approaching.
A day after the fire and still not returning to her home, Fulop-Furlano recognized her son’s burnt tricycle, standing in smoldering ashes, in a photo circulating on the internet. “Seeing this photo was the first time it sank for me in how devastating this fire was,” she said.
Some of their neighbors are among those who have met evacuation efforts and formed pop-up fireworks that were left behind to protect their homes from flames.
“I know this has been catastrophic across the state and Cal Fire is so tense, but there was just a mentality that ‘If Cal Fire is not here, we’ll do it ourselves,'” she said.
Now, the Fulop-Furlano family is undergoing the “cunning experience of trying to specify what we lost”, knowing that the heaviest losses are the valuable heirs who cannot be claimed on an insurance list.
Iterations of her story are scattered throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, where residents are confronted by a barrage of flames – including the second and third largest wildfires on record – before the California peak season itself begins.
The LNU Lightning Complex fires, which swept through the California wilderness, had burned through nearly 369,000 acres and had been neck and neck in recent days with the simultaneous SCU Lightning Complex fire east of the San Francisco Bay for the rank of on one to largest fire in recorded California history.
Although reinforcements from other states and countries have helped firefighters, scattering tin as hundreds of fires burnt across the state simultaneously, harsh, dry weather conditions over the past fourteen days have fueled fireworks, which ignite and ignite huge, unusual flames.
Fresh evacuation orders were issued after the LNU fire jumped a highway and threatened homes in County Colusa and Yolo. The fire killed at least five people, including Douglas Mai, 82, and Leon Bone, 64, of Vacaville.
Smoke from fires across the west has swept across the country, smothering some regions with toxic fumes – leaving those with respiratory conditions already susceptible to deadly complications of contracting Covid-19, particularly vulnerable.
Residents throughout the state had to weigh the risks of staying with family or at evacuation centers, where they could spread or contract coronavirus, against the cost of isolating in expensive hotel rooms or staying in their cars.
Wildfire scientists and government officials have warned of a bleak outlook over the coming months. “We are putting every asset we can, pointing to every conceivable source, to fight these historic fires,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at a news conference on Wednesday. The onslaught of flames this month, “not only sets us on pace to have a historic wildfire season, but actually sets the pace for a historic wildfire season,” he said.
Autumn, when powerful offshore winds traditionally caused the largest, most destructive fires in California, is yet to come. “The fact that we had really serious fires in August does not reduce the risk of serious fires in October and November at all,” Field said.
Although the California landscape is adapted to fires, climate change has affected extreme, destructive leaves – and every day the risks of major and catastrophic disasters are traced, Field said. “I think about it – we’re sitting in a car, trying to make a sharp turn at 85 miles per hour,” he explained. As the climate crisis escalates, “it’s that we could barely stay on the road, and now there’s the risk of us deviating.”
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