Caldor fire levels California town of Grizzly Flats as dry weather fuels blazes
Few homes were left standing in Grizzly Flats, California, the small northern California forest town leveled by the Caldor fire on Tuesday.
Streets in the town of about 1,200 people were littered with downed power lines and poles. Houses were reduced to smoldering ash and twisted metal with only chimneys rising above the ruins. A post office and elementary school were also destroyed. Two people were in the hospital with serious injuries.
Thousands more structures still lay in the path of the fast-moving fire. On Wednesday morning, the blaze was 0% contained, with crews desperately working to contain the damage.
The destruction in Grizzly Flats came as dangerously dry and windy weather continued to fuel huge blazes across the American west and prompted the nation’s largest utility to begin shutting off power to tens of thousands of customers.
Whipped by the winds, the Caldor fire exhibited extreme behavior as it tore through El Dorado county, exploding in size between Monday and Wednesday morning to more than 53,770 acres.
“The fire has grown. It is spreading quickly,” Chris Vestal, a public information officer on the fire, said on Tuesday, noting that the fire had grown so quickly that it was outpacing the department’s ability to document it.
Officials at a community meeting on Tuesday evening said there weren’t enough resources on the ground to effectively battle the blaze, as crews were stretched thin fighting more than 100 fires burning in the west. Only 242 personnel were battling the fire as of Tuesday night but Wednesday’s incident report said additional resources were arriving on the fire.
“The rapidly changing complexity and immediate needs of the incident have prevented assessing the quantity of resources resulting in no reported changes to the documented numbers,” the report said.
Derek Shaves and Tracy Jackson were helping their friend salvage food and other supplies from the Grizzly Pub & Grub, a business in the evacuation zone that wasn’t touched by the blaze.
Shaves said he had just visited Grizzly Flats and saw his home and most of the houses in his neighborhood had been destroyed by the fire.
“It’s a pile of ash,” he said. “Everybody on my block is a pile of ash and every block that I visited, but for five separate homes that were safe, was totally devastated.”
More than 100 fires across western states
There are 104 large fires burning in the US, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, and they have already torched more than 2.4 million acres.
Western states have seen historic drought and weeks of high temperatures and dry weather that have left trees, brush and grasslands as flammable as tinder. The climate crisis has made the region warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more destructive, scientists say.
Eleven of the blazes are burning in California, where the area burned by fires is outpacing last year’s. More than 4.2m acres burned in the state in 2020, but the total acreage burned this year is 40% higher than at this time last year.
The Dixie fire, the largest single fire in California history, gained even more ground in recent days, swelling to more than 635,700 acres in the northern Sierra Nevada and southern Cascades. It was 33% contained by Wednesday morning, a small bump from the previous night.
The town of Susanville, population about 18,000, had been under threat from the fire but by Wednesday morning officials said a resource-heavy firefight had spared the town. The flames came within eight miles of the community, which had previously served as an evacuation refuge for those who had already fled the behemoth blaze.
To the east, spot fires burned some structures south of the small community of Janesville, which had been ordered evacuated. But a surge of firefighters was able to herd the fire around the majority of the town, said Mark Brunton, an operations section chief.
Red flag warnings remained in effect in the areas where the fire was burning. Officials said a cold front had come through, aiding firefighters with clearer air and more favorable conditions. But wind gusts across the ridgetops and valleys are expected to increase and will come in from a new direction through Wednesday afternoon.
Meanwhile, shifting wind has
pushed smoke from the fires across the San Francisco Bay Area, casting an ominous orange glow and causing unsafe air quality in some areas far from where the fires are burning. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District issued an air quality advisory on Wednesday in response.
The utility Pacific Gas & Electric announced it had begun shutting off power to some 51,000 customers in small portions of 13 northern counties to prevent winds from knocking down or fouling power lines and sparking new blazes. More shutoffs are expected.
The utility said the precautionary shutoffs were focused in the Sierra Nevada foothills, the North Coast, the North Valley and the North Bay mountains and could last into Wednesday afternoon.
Investigations continue
Investigations into the cause of the fires are continuing. PG&E has notified utility regulators that the Dixie and Fly fires may have been caused by trees falling into its power lines.
The Dixie fire began near the town of Paradise, which was devastated by a 2018 wildfire ignited by PG&E equipment during strong winds. Eighty-five people died in that blaze. The fires in California come on top of two dozen burning in Montana and nearly 50 more in Idaho, Washington and Oregon, according to the National Fire Interagency Center.
In Montana, authorities ordered evacuations on Tuesday for several remote communities in north- central Montana as strong winds propelled a large wildfire toward inhabited areas.