Growth of state’s largest fire slows, but threat continues
California’s largest fire this year grew slightly Sunday, held in check partly by its own thick plumes of smoke that hung overhead and darkened the skies.
But strong dry winds in coming days could renew intensified and fastspreading danger from the vast Dixie Fire in Butte and Plumas counties, officials said Sunday evening — potentially threatening more than a dozen communities in the mountainous and forested northeast section of the state.
“It’s really rugged, rough terrain out here with heavy fuels,” Mike Wink, the operations section chief in the fire’s west zone, told a Sunday evening briefing. “We’re looking for every opportunity to get this thing boxed in.” The fire east of Chico that began on July 14 had consumed 192,849 acres by Sunday night and was 21% contained. Nearly 5,500 personnel were deployed to keep it from spreading beyond the current 82mile perimeter — a boundary, officials said, that would extend from Chico south past Sacramento if it was pulled straight.
Mandatory evacuation orders were in place for several communities along Highway 79 and south of Lake Almanor. In other locales, residents were warned to be prepared to evacuate if needed.
No firefighters battling the inferno have been injured so far. Twentythree structures have been confirmed as destroyed, a number that officials caution is certain to expand because most of the area within the boundary remains offlimits to inspection crews.
The unstable weather in a remote corner of a droughtstarved state raised the possibility that large pyrocumulus clouds could develop over the fire zone, causing lightning storms and increasing the potential for more spot fires — a replay of what intensified the Dixie Fire’s growth during last week’s heat wave. By contrast on Sunday, the smoke created an inversion layer that in effect sealed off the fire area from extreme heat or unstable conditions.
“Today, the smoke turned out to be our friend,” said Julia Rutherford, the incident meteorologist keeping tabs on the fire. “It helped to shade the ground and keep the conditions quieter than they would have been otherwise.”
But current forecasts see temperatures again possibly topping 100 degrees in the area by later this week. The chance of thunderstorms also remains.
Making things worse, the scattered roads and rough terrain in the huge area mean that fire crews often can’t bring their engines to the front lines.
“I talked to one firefighter who said he hiked 17 miles in one 24hour shift,” Rick Carhart, a public information officer for Cal Fire, said Sunday afternoon. “Large areas are so steep, and so inaccessible.”
Smoke from the fire has spread across much of the northeast region of the state. Unhealthy air quality was reported Sunday afternoon in the Lake Tahoe area to the south and at least as far east as Reno.
Beyond the damage already wrought by the Dixie Fire, veterans of California’s annual struggle with large conflagrations are concerned that battles of this scale are happening so early in the season.
“To be engaged like we are in the middle of July, that’s scary,” Carhart said. “We’re seeing conditions we might otherwise see in September or October.”
Firefighting strike teams worked overnight Saturday into Sunday to protect structures in the Sierra community of Indian Falls.
The Dixie Fire had burned across Highways 70 and 89 by Sunday morning, also burning into the Greenville Wye, Cal Fire said.