Category Archives: Forest Fires

A 22-acre fire burning in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest was considered fully lined Tuesday, with forestry officials forecasting full containment by the end of the week. Dubbed the Josephine fire, it’s burning on the Wild Rivers Ranger District in a hard-to-reach spot on the back side of Woodcock Mountain near Josephine Creek, just outside the Biscuit fire burn scar. Crews first responded to the blaze Sunday. The fire can be accessed only on the ground by some forest roads that don’t receive much maintenance, U.S. Forest Service public affairs officer Virginia Gibbons said. …The fire’s slow-moving nature, aided by higher elevation and moister fuels, has been a boon to firefighters, Gibbons said.

SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, CALIF — A giant sequoia has been found smouldering and smoking in a part of Sequoia National Park that burned in one of California’s huge wildfires last year, the National Park Service said Wednesday.  “The fact areas are still smouldering and smoking from the 2020 Castle Fire demonstrates how dry the park is,” said Leif Mathiesen, assistant fire management officer for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in central California. “With the low amount of snowfall and rain this year, there may be additional discoveries as spring transitions into summer.”  The smouldering tree was found recently by scientists and fire crews surveying the effects of the blaze, which was ignited by lightning last August and spread over more than 270 square miles (699 square kilometres) of the Sierra Nevada. It took five months to fully contain.

HAPPY CAMP, Calif. — Firefighters continue to battle a wildfire burning seven miles southeast of Happy Camp. As of Monday morning, the fire is 50-acres with unknown containment.  Klamath National Forest Firefighters responded to the fire yesterday afternoon after it began burning, around 2 p.m., near the East Fork of Elk Creek. According to Klamath United States Forest Service (USFS) officials, Cal Fire also responded with a helicopter and ground crews.  USFS confirmed two crews, five engines, and a dozer have been assigned to the fire. Officials say crews are currently facing challenges including rugged, steep terrain and dead snags from previous fires.

A federal judge overseeing Pacific Gas & Electric’s criminal probation said Tuesday that he is considering requiring the utility to be more aggressive about turning off its electricity lines near tall trees, a plan that could double the number of power outages for some Northern California counties over the next decade.  The proposal outlined during a two-hour court hearing is the latest effort to prevent the utility’s equipment from sparking more deadly wildfires by reducing the likelihood that trees could fall into the utility’s long-neglected electrical equipment. U.S. District Judge William Alsup is overseeing PG&E’s safety precautions as part of the utility’s criminal probation after its natural gas lines blew up a suburban neighborhood south of San Francisco in 2010.

Even though it’s only February, California has begun the year with already more than double the number of wildfires than in the first month of 2020 — a record-setting year. And the number of acres burned on non-federal land last month was more than 20 times the state’s 5-year average for January. While the rain and snow of the past week may make last year’s fire season seem like a distant memory, the numbers are a reminder that wildfires have become more common year-round in California. During January, there were 297 fires that burned 1,171 acres statewide on non-federal land, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. During the same period last year, there were 97 wildfires throughout the state that burned 22 acres. The five-year average for January is 108 fires, with 58 acres burned, according to Cal Fire.

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Months-old embers from a deadly California fire were blown back to life Tuesday by powerful winds that raked the state and prompted safety blackouts to tens of thousands of people.  Firefighters chased wind-driven blazes up and down the state, trees and trucks were toppled, Yosemite National Park was forced to close and two coronavirus vaccination centres were shut down.  … Two were within the area burned by last year’s CZU Lightning Complex inferno.  “Fires within the CZU Lightning Complex burn area were regenerated by high winds,” the local unit of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection tweeted.  …The Santa Cruz Mountains have a thick layer of “duff,” dead vegetation under heavy timber in which deep smouldering embers can be revived by the wind, said Cecile Juliette, a Cal Fire spokeswoman

The uncontrolled wildfires that raged across California this year devastated lives, homes, forests and entire watersheds. We set a dubious record for most acres burned in a single year: 4.1 million and counting. It takes a long time to recover from such intense fires. …As representatives of urban and rural communities in this watershed, we appreciate that our lives are interconnected by the effects of wildfire. …We also know that the way we have historically managed our forests must change. Today, millions of acres of forest, too crowded with trees and brush, are primed for catastrophic fire with little or no resilience to accommodate our changing climate. For this, we can blame last-century practices of extinguishing every forest fire as rapidly as possible. …Local agencies must take the lead on forest restoration efforts. …Also, each of us needs to accept that small-scale, controlled fires are a natural condition in California.

Southwest Oregon’s second-longest fire season on record ended at 9 a.m. Friday, the Oregon Department of Forestry reported.  The 190-day season began May 1, among the earliest start dates on record, due to dry conditions and an outlook for above-normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation.  There have been three earlier start dates: April 3, 1964, April 20, 1977, and April 18, 1988. The 1988 fire season is the longest season on record, lasting 199 days, according to ODF records that date back to 1964.  Overnight rain helped with the decision to end the season Friday, but the area’s extended forecast was key.  “If you look into next week, we have a lot of chances for additional precipitation,” ODF public information officer Natalie Weber said. “Thursday really gave us that flip in the weather that we’ve been looking for, where it’s just consistently cooler, consistently rain in the forecast.”

Brian Ballou saw the 2020 fire season coming for a long time. …Labor Day 2020 was that moment. Severe drought, extreme winds and multiple ignitions fueled the most destructive wildfires in state history. Roughly 1.07 million acres burned during the 2020 season, the second-most on record. The cost to fight the fires was a record, $609 million and rising. But even more striking was the number of homes lost. From 2015 to 2019… Oregon lost a combined 93 homes, according to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center. This year, 4,009 homes burned down. …The largest wildfires in state history are actually believed to have taken place in the 1800s. …The era of giant fires started coming to an end with the creation of the Forest Service and Oregon Department of Forestry, which brought almost a century of aggressive suppression.  But putting out every fire led to a buildup of fuels in the forest that… led to the return of megafires in Oregon…

Thousands of Californians were allowed to return to their homes Wednesday as calmer winds helped firefighters beat back two wind-driven wildfires that had spurred widespread evacuations. Roughly 100,000 people were ordered to evacuate Monday after the wildfires broke out in brushy hills above cities in Southern California’s Orange County amid fierce winds and extremely dry weather conditions. On Wednesday, evacuation orders were lifted for all residents in the city of Irvine about 56 kilometers south of Los Angeles, which saw more than a quarter of its 280,000 people forced from their homes. Evacuation orders also were lifted for the nearby Blue Ridge Fire, where thousands of people … had been under orders to flee. Firefighters made progress as the winds subsided and the spread of the flames slowed. The Irvine-area Silverado Fire was 32% contained by Wednesday evening and the Blue Ridge Fire to the north was 23% surrounded after being virtually uncontained a day earlier.

Already in the midst of the worst wildfire season on record, California faces the most favorable conditions for instigating large wildfires so far this year, beginning Sunday afternoon and lasting into Tuesday. The combination of hurricane-force wind gusts and extremely dry conditions mean that the potential of a fire starting, and spreading rapidly, is unusually high. In the San Francisco Bay and areas from Sacramento northward, high winds of up to 80 mph are expected in higher elevations, with gusts to 50 mph possible even in downtown San Francisco. The National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center has designated much of Northern California’s fire risk as “extremely critical,” the most severe level on its scale. …The National Weather Service forecast office in Sacramento wrote a foreboding technical forecast discussion on its website Sunday morning, making clear that this event has the potential to be historic.

A dire wildfire crisis is unfolding in Colorado after a blaze exploded sixfold in size in just 24 hours, growing to about 125,600 acres on Thursday morning. The East Troublesome Fire, burning in Grand County and extending now into Rocky Mountain National Park, forced hundreds to quickly evacuate from Grand Lake and Granby overnight, with more evacuations taking place Thursday and an unknown number of structures reportedly destroyed. The blaze has all the hallmarks of climate change. It’s burning at an elevation of 9,000 feet at a time of year when snow should be falling. The fire is also raging during a severe drought, aggravated by record heat, through stands of trees killed or weakened by a bark beetle infestation. The East Troublesome Fire is now the fourth-largest wildfire in Colorado history. Three of the state’s five largest wildfires on record have now occurred in 2020. 

Vast areas of national forest from areas west of Denver all the way to the Wyoming border are closed Wednesday as Colorado faces historic wildfires that may get worse due to windy weather.  The U.S. Forest Service said Tuesday that due to the “unprecedented and historic fireconditions,” it was temporarily closing national forest lands in Clear Creek, Jefferson, Gilpin, Boulder and Larimer counties. “The number of large fires and extreme fire behavior we are seeing on our Forests this year is historic,” Forest Supervisor Monte Williams said in a statement. “These temporary closures are necessary to protect the public and our firefighters, and we will keep them in place until conditions improve and we are confident that the risk of new fire starts has decreased.” …Officials said that new fires and the “explosive growth” of existing blazes across northern Colorado — such as the Cameron Peak, CalWood and Lefthand Canyon Fires — led to the decision.

The Creek Fire has grown to 352,339 acres and remained at 61% containment, according to an update Tuesday morning.  The fire grew by more than 2,000 acres from Monday into Tuesday morning. Fire activity in the South Zone remained as hot spots, but they did not pose a significant risk.  In the North Zone, “heavy mop-up” is still occurring around Central Camp, according to the National Forest Service.  Fire crews were expecting high temperatures into the day, which were above average for this time of the year.  The number of fire personnel has decreased from previous weeks to 944. … Containment of the Creek Fire, which started Sept. 4, is still expected by Halloween. The cause of the largest single-incident fire in California history remains under investigation.

BOULDER, Colorado — The Cameron Peak Fire burned at least 30 buildings in its latest period of explosive growth. Since last Wednesday the fire has grown by more than 70,000 acres. Official tallies of homes burned haven’t been completed, but authorities are beginning to gather a rough picture, said Larimer County Sheriff Justin Smith. “Since Wednesday we believe between 30 and 50 structures were likely destroyed,” Smith said in a briefing Monday evening. So far, communities scattered around Masonville and Glen Haven have had the greatest losses. …Another round of critical fire weather is expected this week, with a red flag warning already planned for midday Wednesday and into Thursday. More gusty winds and low humidity could increase fire activity.