Wildfires are sweeping through California, forcing thousands out of their homes amid a heat wave and the coronavirus pandemic. One group of fires – the LNU Lightning Complex north of the Bay Area – grew rapidly last night, doubling in size to about 131,000 acres by Thursday, and burning through more than 100 homes and buildings.
At least two people have died in the fires – a pilot on a mission with water supply whose helicopter crashed and a utility company that helped with a fire in the Vacaville area.
As the flames erupted into the city of San Jose in Silicon Valley, they blackened the skies and spit out what was perhaps some of the worst air quality in the world. Ash has ravaged many neighborhoods in the Bay Area, and health officials have asked residents to stay indoors, warning that the combination of polluted air and Covid-19 makes those with respiratory conditions duly vulnerable.
About two dozen large fires and several smaller fires have eaten through tassels and dense forests, wild areas in the Sierra Nevada, southern California, and regions north, east and south of San Francisco.
The coronavirus pandemic has also complicated the government’s ability to evacuate residents safely and provide shelter. The Red Cross has sought to secure hotel rooms for evacuees who cannot stay with family or friends. “Protection at traditional evacuation centers is not our first option this year,” said Jim Burns, a spokesman for the American Red Cross. California is struggling to cope with a short-lived coronavirus case, and plenty of hiding places could boost the spread of Covid-19 among evacuees.
Local counties and the Red Cross have set up some shelters in the state, and as a precautionary measure, “have spread children differently, and have masked volunteers completely,” to slow the spread of disease, Burns said. “It’s just so hard this year.”
Through local community pages, and in group text chains, neighbors have offered each other help with moving farm animals, storage space for personal belongings, and shelter in guest rooms and on couches. “I have had people I barely knew – friends of friends – reach out and say, ‘You can stay with us,'” said Valerie Arbelaez Brown, who evacuated her home in Vacaville with her husband and three children on Wednesday. “It makes us feel really grateful,” she said after her family finally came with family north of the fires.
In some areas, evacuees with underlying health conditions that increase their risk of dying from Covid-19, camping outside evacuation centers, have remained in RVs as well as in their cars.
The LNU fires raging through Napa and Sonoma – the famous regions of California – produce today – threatening 25,000 buildings, according to Cal Fire, the state’s fire department. One vineyard in the area ate fire through irrigated vines, noted Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “I do not think I have seen that before,” he told the Guardian. Normally, the irrigation lines would break the flames – so they do not speak to how dry the landscape is, Swain said.
Another group of fires, called the CZU August Lightning Complex, chilled through mountainous areas surrounding Silicon Valley, forcing 22,000 to flee their homes. The circumstances were “unusual and not seen by veteran firefighters,” Cal Fire officials said.
By 2019, a total of about 259,800 acres across the state had burned by the end of the year. As of this Saturday, nearly 400,000 acres of fire have burned in Northern California alone. “Last year was a relatively mild fire year, but nonetheless,” Swain said, “I think this helps put the seriousness of the current situation into perspective.”
Firefighters said both personnel and equipment were severely depleted, and California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency this week, calling on the entire country to send aid. In Marin County, north of San Francisco, firefighter Jason Weber told the AP he was waiting in Montana for assistance. “We have never seen this level of drawing before” in his 25 years of service, he said.
No sign of reduction is in sight, said Crystal Kolden, a fire scientist at the University of California, Merced. The next two weeks are expected to be hot and dry. “The fires will be difficult to contain until the heat wave breaks,” she said.
Because of global warming, fires in California are becoming “more frequent and extreme,” Kolden said. ‘And that’s what the eye opener is here. “We probably could not, a year ago, have predicted that there would be a pandemic and a lightning storm, and a heat wave this August,” she said. “But we can predict that in general, we need to be more aggressively mitigating for fire.”
Agencies contributed
