A wildfire threatened to surpass 1M acres in Calif.
When the wildfire sparked in Plumas County on a warm afternoon in July, few could have known that it would morph into the monster it soon became. A downed tree, a blown power line fuse and a small ring of fire were all it took to create the second-largest wildfire in California history.
In the days and weeks after the fire began, it produced one ominous sign after another – generating its own lightning, burning clear across the Sierra and, most horrifically, reducing the town of Greenville to ashes.
Soon it was threatening to surpass the size of the wildfire of 2020, the largest wildfire in California history, which burned more than 1 million acres. But after nearly two months of nonstop expansion, something shifted. Seemingly overnight, the weather grew more favorable, the fiery terrain leveled out, and crews were able to turn a corner on the massive blaze. The fire stopped growing, as if frozen in time, at about 963,000 acres. As of Friday, it was 94% contained.
It was a hard-won victory, and experts say there is much to be learned from the wildfire – an unprecedented one even in an era of unprecedented fires.
“We just can’t get used to these kinds of numbers,” said Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at UC Berkeley. “That size is just mind-blowing.”
Many experts said the speed and scale of the wildfire’s spread sent a clear message about the toll extreme heat and drought are having on California’s overgrown landscape. It also amplified the urgent need for more proactive measures to prevent similarly massive fires.
“The (Dixie) fire is the final, nail-inthe-coffin piece of evidence that traditional firefighting methods are not up to the challenge of the kind of wildfires we get in the 2020s,” said Chris Field, director of Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “Basically, this fire jumped over everything that we would have considered a traditional defensible fire line.”
Field attributed a few factors to the fire’s growth – most critically, the century of fire suppression that enabled vegetation to pile up in the state’s forests. When that drought-dried vegetation met with embers from the wildfire, it easily ignited, enabling the blaze to “carve its own path like a glacier.”
The wildfire also confirmed the 2020 wildfire was not the anomaly many hoped it would be. In fact, six of the 10 largest fires in the state’s history have burned in the last two years, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.