- The huge wildfire that has been raging in Northern California has become the third largest fire in the state’s history and will continue to spread.
- Since the outbreak in mid-July, the Dixie fire has burned more than 1,700 square kilometers.
- More than 5,000 people are fighting the fire, which is launching huge smoke into the air, which is easy to see from space.
On Friday, a huge wildfire that swept through northern California became the third largest wildfire in the state’s history, and it looks set to continue to grow.
Scientists claim that long-term droughts caused by climate change have made the western United States hot and dry, susceptible to explosive and highly destructive fires.
The Dixie fire razed the gold rush town of Greenville this week and has burned more than 1,700 square kilometers of land since it erupted in mid-July.
Plumas County Sheriff Todd Johns, who is helping to coordinate fire fighting, said the damage was devastating.
“I am a lifelong resident of Greenville. What happened there broke my heart,” he said at a briefing on Thursday.
“For those who have lost their homes and businesses…their lives are now forever changed.
He added:
I can only tell you: I’m sorry.
On Friday, the town of Greenville was scorched and turned into ruins, the wooden structure disappeared completely, and some stone buildings turned into rubble.
Johns said that so far, the fire has caused no casualties, but emphasized that people on the path of the fire must pay attention to evacuation warnings.
“The fire is not over yet. If that plume comes near you…you need to be prepared. Wherever the wind blows the fire, it will go.”
Regina Rutledge, who fled the town of Chester when the fire spread, said the experience was “very intense.”
“You can see the red color falling from the mountain, the flames blazing into the sky. This is a monster, it really is,” she told AFP.
More than 5,000 people are fighting the fire, which is launching huge smoke into the air, which is easy to see from space.
Incident managers said on Friday that they expected gusts to fuel the fire.
Those winds, coupled with the steep terrain and large amounts of very dry vegetation, fuel the flames and make the job of firefighters more difficult.
Overnight, the area of the Dixie fire increased by about one-fifth, making it larger than the pirated fire that caused waste in large areas of Oregon last month.
Thousands of square kilometers of land in the western United States have been burned this year. This is a surprising result of the effects of global warming on weather patterns.
By late July, the area of land burned in California had increased by more than 250% from 2020—in itself the worst year of wildfires in the state’s modern history.
The Dixie fire evokes painful memories of the fire in heaven, the deadliest fire in California’s recent history.
A faulty power line triggered the fire, which swept through the northern town of Paradise in 2018, killing 86 people. Pacific Gas and Electric, California’s largest energy utility company, is believed to be responsible for this.
On the day the fire started, a tree fell on the power conductor and the PG&E equipment was again blamed on the Dixie fire.
The utility company announced in late July that it would bury 16,000 kilometers of power lines to prevent its equipment from causing more deadly wildfires.
Greenville itself is no stranger to fires. In 1881, a catastrophic fire destroyed most of the town. During this period, several major fires threatened the residents for 140 years.
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