Calif. fire threatens grove with world’s largest tree
Fire crews were warily watching the weather in California as a massive wildfire reached the edges of the Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park, home to around 2,000 giant sequoias — including General Sherman, the world’s largest tree.
On Friday, two wildfires that have burned for a week in the area merged into one, reaching the edge of a historic grove of giant sequoia trees.
“We no longer have a Paradise Fire and a Colony Fire. We now have one fire that grew together yesterday,” Jon Wallace, an operations chief with the incident command team in charge of battling the blaze, said Saturday.
“The fire made a really good push,” Wallace said, adding that it grew about 6,000 acres on Friday.
Last week firefighters wrapped the base of the General Sherman Tree in fire-resistant aluminum, fire spokeswoman Rebecca Paterson said. That’s the type of aluminum used in wildland firefighter emergency shelters and to protect historic wooden structures.
According to the National Park Service, the General Sherman Tree is the world’s largest tree measured by volume. It stands 275 feet tall, and it has a circumference of 103 feet at ground level.
The fires forced the evacuation Sequoia National Park last week, and parts of Three Rivers, a foothill community of about 2,500 people outside the park’s main entrance. Crews have been bulldozing a line between the fire and the community.
On Saturday, the National Weather Service issued a Red Flag Warning for the area, which means “critical fire weather conditions are either occurring now, or will shortly.”
However, fire officials weren’t expecting the kinds of explosive wind-driven growth that has turned Sierra Nevada blazes into monster fires that devoured hundreds of homes.
“There isn’t a lot of extreme weather predicted for the next few days, which is good news, there’s not a lot of big wind shifts predicted. However, there’s also no rain predicted,” Paterson said.
“So we’re anticipating that the fires are going to continue to grow. Hopefully, they’re not going to grow too fast,” she added.
As of Saturday afternoon, the KNP Complex, which is comprised of the Paradise Fire and the Colony Fire, had grown to 17,857 acres.
Giant sequoias are adapted to fire, which can help them thrive by releasing seeds from their cones and creating clearings that allow young one to grow. But the extraordinary intensity of fires — which have been fueled by climate change — can overwhelm the trees.
“Once you get fire burning inside the tree, that will result in mortality,” said operations chief Wallace.
There have been more than 7,000 wildfires in California this year, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The blazes have damaged or destroyed more than 3,000 homes and other buildings and torched over 3.000 square miles of land.
Last year, the Castle Fire killed an estimated 7,500 to 10,600 large sequoias, the National Park Service said.
That was an estimated 10% to 14% of all the sequoias in the world.