California’s record-setting drought has “turned much of the state into a tinderbox”, Gov. Jerry Brown said.
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He said the fire ravaged through the forests at break-neck speed, with firefighters struggling to keep apace. Two more National Guard air tankers were being brought in from Colorado to drop retardant, Tolmachoff said.
As the flames of the Rocky fire force more people from their homes, affected communities are using social media to stay connected.
“We’re all praying it gets put out soon”, said Burton, who had helped organize a group to make signs to post at the county fairgrounds thanking firefighters for their efforts. Sending aircraft farther “slows the process down a little”. “By taking this process out, we’ve opened up all that growing space that fires would have kept in check”. Of those, 52 have been contained, Cal Fire said.
The New York Times picked up the fire story today reporting on the 21 different wildfires now burning across the state, but the Rocky Fire dwarfs them all.
Almost 3,000 firefighters were battling the conflagration that ran into Highway 16 to the east and neared Highway 20 to the north, shutting down both roads.
The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection announced on Monday that a 20-person fire crew will be departing early Tuesday from DEEP Eastern District Headquarters to assist the U.S. Forest in California for two weeks. Authorities are still investigating his death.
It may look like something out of Mad Max: Fury Road, but the apocalyptic scenery in the photos below come from California’s Lake County, where a 54,000-acre wildfire known as the Rocky Fire is just 5% contained as of Monday.
The fire – the largest blaze in drought-stricken California – roughly tripled in size over the weekend to 93 square miles, generating its own winds that fueled the flames and reduced thousands of acres of manzanita shrubs and other brush to blackened landscape land in hours. So far it has destroyed a few 24 residences, and at least 6,000 more structures remain under threat.
Cooler temperatures Monday gave firefighters an upper hand.
On Sunday, August 2, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) allocated a grant to California so that the most essential tools and resources needed for the continuous abolishment of the fires in Lake County may be guaranteed, says Mark Ghilarducci, director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.
The fire began last Wednesday near Clear Lake, north of Santa Rosa.
This NASA image shows smoke from several fires rising yesterday over Oregon and Northern California. All evacuations were lifted Saturday and residents were allowed to return to their homes. Those fires are now nearing containment. Homeowners are doing what they can to prepare but fear they are “one gust of wind away from devastation”.
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“We’re reading the fire, reading the weather, looking at the topography and basing our attack on that”, said Scott McLean, a Cal Fire spokesperson. “They don’t do well in the heat”, Vicki Estrella said.
