That fire, burning across 60,000 acres of drought-starved land, has roared through small towns since breaking out Saturday.
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Authorities said late Sunday that one person had been killed. The Valley Fire has claimed 400 homes already, not to mention many thousand acres worth of forest, which has displaced animals and endangered all manner of life.
Two massive wildfires raging in northern California have devoured more than 100,000 acres. Napa and Lake county officials are warning evacuees to not post their address online.
A CalFire firefighter tends to a backfire as he battles the Valley Fire on September 13, 2015 in Middletown, California.
“The fire is definitely more active today than it was yesterday”, Incident Commander Barry Biermann told AFP.
It’s 30% contained, Berlant said.
Brown had earlier declared a state of emergency for a separate 101-square-mile wildfire about 70 miles southeast of Sacramento that has destroyed 86 homes. It has destroyed 135 homes and was threatening another 6,400 structures.
The family thought the fire was still far away, but it was actually very close to their home. As 1800 firefighters continue to fight these flames, hundreds left camping out at a red cross shelter.
The two new fires getting the most attention – the Butte fire burning in Amador and Calaveras counties and the Valley fire in Lake County – have been unusually unpredictable and staggeringly destructive. At a meeting Sunday night, some evacuees expressed frustration at the number of homes lost.
As the catastrophic Valley Fire spread through Lake County, California, one YouTube user recorded his daring escape from his home down apocalyptic roads flanked by blazing pines.
The recent fires have been fueled by tinder-dry conditions across the western United States, which has been starved for rain for the past several years.
“Some of those evacuees will be escorted back into the fire zone for the first time Tuesday morning to gather any pets and livestock that may have survived when the fast-moving wildfire surged through”.
“We did wait way too long to get out”, he wrote. “In retrospect, we should have gone out for a drive to find out what was going on, but we were a little preoccupied with packing.”
Siragusa said he’s “really concerned” about the extent of the blazes, given that the fire season still has another month and a half.
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But containment of the fire, a measure of how much of its perimeter has been enclosed within buffer lines carved through vegetation by ground crews to prevent its spread, stood at 15 percent, up from 10 percent on Monday, Cal Fire said.
