On Tuesday, firefighters launched an all-out battle in the high wind to protect houses on the edge of the dry forest near Lake Tahoe. Wildfire Has chased thousands of people from popular holiday destinations Californian Sierra Nevada.
The Caldor fire has been burning in the mountains east of the state capital Sacramento since mid-August. It crossed the ridge on Monday and roared along the ridge to the southern end of the Tahoe Basin across the California-Nevada border, triggering a large-scale evacuation.
As South Lake Tahoe, a small town with 22,000 inhabitants, was quickly emptied along with several nearby villages, the local roads were crowded with traffic, leaving the smoky area usually crowded by summer tourists largely empty.
According to the California Forestry and Fire Department (Cal Fire), an estimated 50,000 people were ordered to evacuate due to the Caldo fire.
Fire authorities said the two fires on Tuesday spread to within 3 miles of downtown South Lake Tahoe and within 6 miles of the south shore of Lake Tahoe.
“There are currently a lot of resources dedicated to protecting South Lake Tahoe’s homes and properties,” U.S. Forest Service spokesperson Dana Walsh told Reuters by telephone on Tuesday evening.
Walsh said the direction of the wind was so great that “we don’t expect to push (fire) to the lake tonight.”
Jeff Hodge, a semi-retired banker who worked part-time as a chairlift operator during the ski season, recalled the fear and uncertainty he felt in the hours before Monday’s evacuation. Police from door to door appeared in his apartment in South Lake Tahoe.
“For an elderly person, this is really disturbing,” the 65-year-old said on Tuesday at a Red Cross shelter in Truckee, northwest of Tahoe.
Hodge told Reuters that he installed a pair of guitars and amplifiers, ski equipment, golf clubs, a basket full of clothes, and a bottle of bourbon in his 1995 car, waiting for the traffic to decrease. The soot rained and drove away.
Wind drive flame
By Tuesday, the fire had scorched more than 191,000 acres (77,300 hectares) of dry forest, about 14,000 acres (5,665 hectares) more than the previous day. The firefighters managed to draw a containment line around 16% of its circumference.
The squally wind blew in with a cyclone force of 45 miles per hour, blowing the embers one mile away from the front of the fire, igniting the fire at the scene, as the trees on the hillside exploded in the towering flames.
California Fire Department spokesperson Henry Herrera (Henry Herrera) said that at least 669 buildings were listed as destroyed on Tuesday, most of which were single-family homes, and 34,000 buildings were considered threatened.
There are no reports of deaths. In recent days, three firefighters and two civilians were injured.
Smoke and soot from the fire suffocated the normally pristine sky around Lake Tahoe for several days, causing many tourists from areas known for swimming, boating, hiking and camping to leave early. The area also has world-class ski resorts.
As of Tuesday, nearly 4,000 personnel and a squadron of more than two dozen water drop helicopters had been assigned to the fire, the cause of which is still under investigation.
This year, only the Dixie Fire scorched 771,000 acres (312,000 hectares) of land in the northern part of the mountains, and this year burned more territory than Caldo.
Both fires are one of the last two fires that have raged in California and elsewhere in the West, and the summer fire season became one of the most destructive fire seasons on record. Experts say that extremely hot and dry conditions are a symptom of climate change, which triggered the fire.
In this quarter alone, more than 6,800 wildfires, large and small, destroyed an estimated 1.7 million acres (689,000 hectares) of land in California, making available firefighting forces and equipment very weak. Officials from the California Fire Department and the U.S. Forest Service said that the ferocious fires in the area were unprecedented in history.
The Forest Service closed all 18 national forests in California to the public before mid-September. This is an extraordinary measure that the agency has taken only once before—during the catastrophic fire season last year. The closure officially began at midnight on Tuesday.
As of Wednesday night, the National Weather Service has issued a red flag warning of dangerous gusts and extremely low humidity to the Tahoe area.
(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Truckee, California; writing and supplementary reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; editing by Peter Cooney, Bill Berkrot, and Leslie Adler)
