Wildfire overtakes firefighters in California mountains; 1 in critical condition
SHAVER
LAKE, Calif. (AP) — More than a dozen California firefighters trying to
protect a fire station in rugged mountains were overrun by flames
Tuesday, and several were hurt. Elsewhere, military helicopters rescued
more than 150 people stranded in a burning forest.
Fourteen
firefighters deployed emergency shelters as flames overtook them and
destroyed the Nacimiento Station in the Los Padres National Forest on
the state’s central coast, the U.S. Forest Service said. They suffered
from burns and smoke inhalation, and three were flown to a hospital in
Fresno, where one was in critical condition.
The injuries came as
wind-driven flames of more than two dozen major fires chewed through
bone-dry California and forced new evacuations after a scorching Labor
Day weekend that saw a dramatic airlift of more than 200 people.
Pilots
wearing night-vision goggles to find a place to land before dawn pulled
another 164 people from the Sierra National Forest and were working to
rescue 17 others Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom said.
“It’s where
training meets the moment, but it always takes the courage, the
conviction and the grit of real people doing real work,” said Newsom,
who called the fires historic.
California has already set a record
with nearly 2.3 million acres (930,800 hectares) burned this year, and
the worst part of the wildfire season is just beginning.
The
previous acreage record was set just two years ago and included the
deadliest wildfire in state history, which was started by power lines
and swept through the community of Paradise, killing 85 people.
That
2018 blaze forced the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas &
Electric, to seek bankruptcy protection and guard against new disasters
by cutting power preemptively when fire conditions are exceptionally
dangerous.
The utility shut off power to 172,000 customers over the weekend and more outages were expected in Northern California as high and dry winds were expected until Wednesday.
More
than 14,000 firefighters were battling fires around the state. Two of
the three largest blazes in state history are burning in the San
Francisco Bay Area, though they are largely contained after burning
three weeks.
California was not alone: Hurricane-force winds and high temperatures kicked up wildfires across parts of the Pacific Northwest
over the holiday weekend, burning hundreds of thousands of acres and
mostly destroying the small town of Malden in eastern Washington.
In
Southern California, fires burned in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and
San Diego counties, and the forecast called for the arrival of the
region’s notorious Santa Ana winds. The U.S. Forest Service on Monday
decided to close all eight national forests in the southern half of the
state and shutter campgrounds statewide.
In the Sierra National
Forest east of Fresno, dozens of campers and hikers were stranded at the
Vermilion Valley Resort after the only road in — a narrow route snaking
along a steep cliff — was closed Sunday because of the Creek Fire.
Well
before dawn Tuesday, the sound of helicopter blades chopping through
the air awoke Katelyn Mueller, bringing relief after two anxious nights
camping in the smoke.
“It was probably the one time you’re
excited to hear a helicopter,” Mueller said. “You could almost feel a
sigh of relief seeing it come in.”
She and others had to abandon
their vehicles and were flown to Fresno, where a friend picked her and
three friends up for the drive back to San Diego.
The fire had
roared through the forest exceptionally quickly, advancing 15 miles (24
kilometers) in a single day over the holiday weekend. It has burned 212
square miles (549 square kilometers) since starting Friday from an
unknown origin. Forty-five homes and 20 other structures were confirmed
destroyed so far.
Cressman’s General Store, a gas station and
popular stop for more than a century near Shaver Lake, was a total loss.
Flames threatened the foothill community of Auberry between the lake
and Fresno.
The use of military helicopters to rescue a large
number of civilians for a second day — after 214 people were lifted to
safety after flames trapped them in a wooded camping area near Mammoth
Pool Reservoir on Saturday — is rare, if not unprecedented.
Char
Miller, a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College who has
written extensively about wildfires, said he’s only seen rescues of this
size during floods, when people need to be plucked from narrow canyons.
“This is emblematic of how fast that fire was moving, plus the
physical geography of that environment with one road in and one road
out. It’s scary enough to drive there when nothing is burning,” Miller
said. “Unless you wanted an absolute human disaster, you had to move
fast.”
Steve Lohr of the U.S. Forest Service defended the decision not to close the national forests sooner.
“We
can second-guess ourselves, but I’ll say that we didn’t take the
situation lightly,” Lohr said. “When you have a fire run 15 miles in one
day, in one afternoon, there’s no model that can predict that. And so
we can look at those things and learn from them, but the fires are
behaving in such a way that we’ve not seen.”
Numerous studies in
recent years have linked bigger wildfires in America to global warming
from the burning of coal, oil and gas, especially because climate change
has made California much drier. A drier California means plants are
more flammable.
“The frequency of extreme wild fire weather has
doubled in California over the past four decades, with the main driver
being the effect of rising temperature on dry fuels, meaning that the
fuel loads are now frequently at record or near-record levels when
ignition occurs and when strong winds blow,” Stanford climate scientist
Noah Diffenbaugh said in an email.
Arson is suspected as the cause
of the blaze that injured the firefighters above the scenic Big Sur
coastal region. The fire had been burning for weeks, but doubled in size
overnight.
Police arrested a Fresno man near the fire’s starting point Aug. 19 on charges that included arson of forestland and illegal marijuana cultivation. He’s being held on $2 million bail.
Melley reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Christopher Weber, Frank Baker and John Antczak in Los Angeles, Olga Rodriguez and Juliet Williams in San Francisco and Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed.