Monster wildfire stirs fear in Calif.
Dixie inferno grows into second-largest blaze in state history
After four years of homelessness, Kesia Studebaker thought she finally landed on her feet when she found a job cooking in a diner and moved into a house in the small community of Greenville.
She had been renting for three months and hoped the stability would help her win back custody of her 14-year-old daughter. But in just one night, a raging wildfire tore through the mountain town and “took it all away,” she said.
Fueled by strong winds and bone-dry vegetation, the Dixie Fire is now the second-largest wildfire in California history, burning more than 463,000 acres through a large swath of Northern California and destroying over 400 homes and commercial buildings as firefighters struggled to get the upper hand Sunday.
“We knew we didn’t get enough rainfall and fires could happen, but we didn’t expect a monster like this,” Studebaker said over the weekend.
The fire incinerated much of Greenville on Wednesday and Thursday, destroying 370 homes and structures and threatening nearly 14,000 buildings in the northern Sierra Nevada. It had scorched an area more than twice the size of New York City.
The Dixie Fire, named for the road where it started, grew overnight to an area of 725 square miles Sunday and was just 21% contained, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Cooler weather was slowing the spread of the fire, but it remained a dangerous monster, and thousands of residents of small mountain communities remained evacuated.
The wildfire is burning in Plumas, Butte, Lassen and Tehama counties.
“We basically have a blanket of smoke covering the fire
area, which is shielding us from direct sunlight,” said Edwin Zuniga, a public information officer on the fire.
Although the smoke resulted in dismal air quality across the region, it was helping to suppress fire activity by keeping temperatures down, humidity slightly higher and wind speeds a bit lower.
The fire ignited July 13 near a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. power station in Feather River Canyon and might have been caused by a Douglas fir falling on a power line, PG&E said. The utility has said its equipment may also be to blame for sparking the Fly Fire, which started nine days later and eventually merged with the Dixie Fire, as well as a separate wildfire in Magalia that was extinguished July 14 at a quarter of an acre.
The fire was burning through all kinds of terrain — steep, thickly timbered areas as well as flatter brush and grasslands — with its sheer size posing logistical hurdles.
The fire on Friday surpassed the Bootleg fire in Oregon to become the largest in the United States this year.
“Just trying to make the plans and get everybody to the right places, it’s a huge job,” Rick Carhart, public information officer with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said of firefighting logistics. “I would say that’s the challenge right now, is taking this huge fire and breaking it up into pieces and getting it under control as best we can.”
Time was of the essence, as the favorable weather conditions weren’t expected to last long. A warming trend was forecast to start early in the week, with temperatures pushing above normal by the week’s end, Rowe said.
“It is going to get hot, and it’s going to get sunny, and the wind is going to blow. ... That’s just life in Northern California,” Carhart said. “So while we have this favorable weather, we’re going to take advantage of it and do everything we can to get as far ahead of the game as we can before the weather turns on us again.”
Four firefighters were taken to the hospital Friday after being struck by a fallen branch. More than 20 people were initially reported missing, but by Saturday afternoon authorities had contacted all but four of them.
Studebaker sought shelter at an evacuation center before setting up her tent in a friend’s front yard.
She is counting on returning to her job if the restaurant where she works stays open. Her boss also evacuated when the town of Chester, northwest of Greenville, lost power and the smoke was so thick that it made it hard to breathe.
Heat waves and historic drought tied to climate change have made wildfires harder to fight in the American West. Scientists have said climate change has made the region much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.
California’s fire season is on track to surpass last year’s season, which was the worst fire season in recent recorded state history.
Since the start of the year, more than 6,000 blazes have destroyed more than 1,260 square miles of land — more than triple the losses for the same period in 2020, according to state fire figures.