“We’re experiencing fires like we’ve not seen in many, many years,” Govin Newsom said.
Fires have shot up more acres than last year
Statewide, there have been more than 360 recent fires – most of them caused by lightning. Several of those fires spread due to high temperatures, inaccessible terrain and limited resources.
The 22 major firefighters who still burned a total of 660,000 acres in the entire screws, said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director of Cal Fire. They have destroyed or damaged 660 structures.
They include two major fires – the LNU Lightning Complex and the SCU Lightning Complex – both a combination of different extinguishers burning in the same area. By early Friday, they had 215,000 acres and 157,475 acres of torch, respectively.
Several global air quality monitoring websites show that air quality levels in the Bay Area of California are lower than anywhere else, including locations that are generally considered to be the worst air quality such as India and eastern China.
Deaths reported in several counties
At least four deaths were reported Thursday as a result of the LNU fire – the largest burn in the state. It consists of at least 11 smaller fires that spread across five counties in Northern California.
Three of the dead are from Napa County and one is from Solano County. In addition to the dead, four others were injured, Cal Fire said in a statement Thursday.
More evacuations are underway
The nearby University of California, Santa Cruz, is requesting a voluntary evacuation.
“We have encouraged those living on campus to leave proactively if they have a safe place to move outside the area,” it said in a statement. “It is critical that we do this to reduce the number of people on campus that need to be evacuated if and when a mandatory evacuation is issued for our campus.”
Firefighters have said they do not have an exact number on how many people told them to leave their homes.
The top priorities are the safety of the firefighter and the public, evacuation planning, and the protection of structures and infrastructure, said Cal Fire Operations Chief Chris Waters.
Governor strikes power blackouts
As if the pandemic, burns, and burning heat wave were not bad enough, some Californians have lost electricity because the state’s power grid is struggling to keep up with demand.
Rolling blackouts were implemented over the weekend when an intense heat wave caused record-setting temperatures across the state, including an altitude of 130 degrees in Death Valley on Sunday.
Gavin Newsom demanded an investigation into the power outages, which he said were unacceptable.
“These blackouts, which occurred without warning or sufficient time for preparation, are unacceptable and do not meet the nation’s largest and most innovative state,” Newsom wrote in a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission and of the California Energy Commission.
The wildfires are a result of climate change
“The clearest link between wildfires in California and anthropogenic climate change to date has been through warming-induced increases in atmospheric aridity, which works to dry up fuels and promote summer forest fires,” the report said.
“It has been well established that warming promotes wildfire throughout the western U.S., particularly in forested regions, by increasing the atmospheric demand of the atmosphere and decreasing moisture from the summer soil as snowpack decreases.”
Park Williams, lead author of the study and a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said man-made warming of the planet has caused vapor pressure deficits to increase by 10% since late 1800s, which means more evaporation has been prevented.
By 2060, he expects that effect to double.
“This is important because we’ve already seen a big change in the wildfire activity in California from the first 10%. Increasing evaporation has exponential effects on fires, so the next 10% increase will probably have even potter effects, “he told CNN last year.
Thousands of fires are burning nationwide
More than 11 million people are at too high a warning in the Southwest, said CNN meteorologist Robert Shackelford. Three-digit temperatures are possible in all of these areas with temperatures still above average, he added.
While the West suffers record-breaking heat, wildfires are destroying many parts of the U.S. – with red-flag warnings from the Northwest in the Rockies.
The fires burned a total of 879,039 acres. In addition to California, some states with multiple fires include Arizona with 12, Alaska with seven, and Colorado with five.
CNN’s Holly Yan, Dan Simon, Stella Chan, Jason Hanna, Brandon Miller and Jon Passantino contributed to this report.
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