LONDON (AP) — Wildfires fueled by climate change have ravaged communities from Maui to the Mediterranean this summer, killing many people, exhausting firefighters and fueling demand for new solutions. Enter artificial intelligence.

Firefighters and startups are using AI-enabled cameras to scan the horizon for signs of smoke. A German company is building a constellation of satellites to detect fires from space. And Microsoft is using AI models to predict where the next blaze could be sparked.

With wildfires becoming larger and more intense as the world warms, firefighters, utilities and governments are scrambling to get ahead of the flames by tapping into the latest AI technology — which has stirred both fear and excitement for its potential to transform life. While increasingly stretched first responders hope AI offers them a leg up, humans are still needed to check that the tech is accurate.

California’s main firefighting agency this summer started testing an AI system that looks for smoke from more than 1,000 mountaintop camera feeds and is now expanding it statewide.

The system is designed to find “abnormalities” and alert emergency command centers, where staffers will confirm whether it’s indeed smoke or something else in the air.

“The beauty of this is that it immediately pops up on the screen and those dispatchers or call takers are able to interrogate that screen” and determine whether to send a crew, said Phillip SeLegue, staff chief of intelligence for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The cameras, part of a network that workers previously had to watch, provide billions of bytes of data for the AI system to digest. While humans still need to confirm any smoke sightings, the system helps reduce fatigue among staffers typically monitoring multiple screens and cameras, alerting them to look only when there’s possible fire or smoke, SeLegue said.

It’s already helped. A battalion chief got a smoke alert in the middle of the night, confirmed it on his cellphone and called a command center in San Diego to scramble first responders to the remote area.

The dispatchers said that if they hadn’t been alerted, the fire would have been much larger because it likely wouldn’t have been noticed until the next morning, SeLegue said.

San Francisco startup Pano AI takes a similar approach, mounting cameras on cell towers that scan for smoke and alert customers, including fire departments, utility companies and ski resorts.

The cameras use computer vision machine learning, a type of AI.

“They’re trained very specifically to detect smoke or not, and we train them with images of smoke and images of not smoke,” CEO Sonia Kastner said.

The images are combined with feeds from government weather satellites that scan for hotspots, along with other data sources, such as social media posts.

The technology gets around one of the main problems in the traditional way of detecting wildfires — relying on 911 calls from passers-by that need confirmation from staffers before crews and water-dropping planes can be deployed.

“Generally, only one in 20 of these 911 calls are actually a wildfire. Even during fire season, it might be a cloud or fog or a barbecue,” Kastner said.

Pano AI’s systems do still rely on final confirmation, with managers playing a time lapse of the camera feed to ensure it’s smoke rising.

For fighting forest fires, “technology is becoming really essential,” said Larry Bekkedahl, senior vice president of energy delivery at Portland General Electric, Oregon’s largest utility and a Pano AI customer.

Utility companies sometimes play a role in sparking wildfires, when their power lines are knocked down by wind or struck by falling trees. Hawaii’s electric utility acknowledged that its power lines started a devastating blaze in Maui this summer after apparently being downed by high winds.

PGE, which provides electricity to 51 cities in Oregon, has deployed 26 Pano AI cameras, and Bekkedahl said they have helped speed up response and coordination with emergency services.

Previously, fire departments were “running around looking for stuff and not even really knowing exactly where it’s at,” he said. The cameras help detect fires quicker and get teams on the ground faster, shaving up to two hours off response times.

“That’s significant in terms of how fast that fire can can spread and grow,” Bekkedahl said.

Using AI to detect smoke from fires “is relatively easy,” said Juan Lavista Ferres, chief data scientist at Microsoft.

“What is not easy is to have enough cameras that cover enough places,” he said, pointing to vast, remote areas in northern Canada that have burned this summer.

Ferres’ team at Microsoft has been developing AI models to predict where fires are likely to start. They have fed the model with maps of areas that burned previously, along with climate and geospatial data.

The system has its limitations — it can’t predict random events like a lightning strike. But it can sift through historical weather and climate data to identify patterns, such as areas that are typically drier. Even a road, which indicates people are nearby, is a risk factor, Ferres said.

“It’s not going to get it all perfectly right,” he said. “But what it can do is it can build a probability map (based on) what happened in the past.”

The technology, which Microsoft plans to offer as an open source tool, can help first responders trying to figure out where to focus their limited resources, Ferres said.

Another company is looking to the heavens for a solution. German startup OroraTech analyzes satellite images with artificial intelligence.

Taking advantage of advances in camera, satellite and AI technology, OroraTech has launched two mini satellites about the size of a shoebox into low orbit, about 550 kilometers (340 miles) above Earth’s surface. The Munich-based company has ambitions to send up eight more next year and eventually put 100 into space.

As wildfires swept central Chile this year, OroraTech said it provided thermal images at night when aerial drones are used less frequently.

Weeks after OroraTech launched its second satellite, it detected a fire near the community of Keg River in northern Alberta, where flames burned remote stretches of boreal forest repeatedly this summer.

“There are algorithms on the satellite, very efficient ones to detect fires even faster,” CEO Thomas Gruebler said.

The AI also takes into account vegetation and humidity levels to identify flare-ups that could spawn devastating megafires. The technology could help thinly stretched firefighting agencies direct resources to blazes with the potential to cause the most damage.

“Because we know exactly where the fires are, we can see how the fires will propagate,” Gruebler said. “So, which fire will be the big fire in one day and which will stop on their own.”

___

AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed.

Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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• Rising housing costs have helped push Americans into parts of the country more vulnerable to climate change. 
• US counties that have the most at-risk homes are all growing in population.
• The trend shows how the burden of climate change is falling disproportionately on less affluent people.

The skyrocketing cost of housing has pushed many Americans to trade their lives in big coastal cities like New York and San Francisco for more affordable ones in Sunbelt cities and Southern suburbs. 

But that move could cost more in the long-run. 

These more affordable regions of the country are also facing much more severe impacts of climate change, including extreme heat, wildfires, floods, and droughts. People are pouring into flood-prone Florida, moving into Houston not long after Hurricane Harvey devastated the city in 2017, and relocating to parts of the West and Southwest dealing with the worst droughts and wildfires in the country. 

Rather than leaving areas at high risk of natural disasters and other climate issues, more Americans are moving into them. US counties that have the most at-risk homes are all growing in population, while those with the fewest at-risk homes are almost all losing residents, according to a 2021 Redfin analysis.

The pandemic exacerbated this trend. There’s been a recent spike in people moving from more expensive cities to lower-cost, smaller places farther from large metros and closer to natural amenities, in part due to the rise in remote work. These locations – like Bend, Oregon, which is vulnerable to wildfires — tend to be more at risk of natural disasters. The number of loan applications for homes in high-risk areas rose from 90,462 in February 2020 to 187,669 in February 2022, Freddie Mac reported.

In the longer-term, this trend will put many more Americans at risk of losing their homes to wildfires and floods, or being hurt or killed by extreme heat, or suffering from a lack of water. Rich people are already better able to protect themselves from natural disasters and other climate impacts, whether by fleeing, hiring private firefighters, or retrofitting their homes. But if lower-risk cities continue to price people out, the burden of climate change will fall even more disproportionately on less affluent communities. 

Experts say there are ways that local, state, and federal governments can help to reverse this dangerous trend. 

A recent Brookings Institution report recommended several ways that policymakers can encourage Americans to seek climate safety. First, the researchers say that Congress and the the Federal Housing Finance Agency should work with mortgage lenders and property insurers to factor climate risk into their rates, charging homeowners more based on how much risk they’re taking on.

Often, homebuyers don’t know what kinds of climate risks their property faces, so state and local governments should develop rules about what information needs to be disclosed to a potential homebuyer and then impose higher taxes on riskier property. 

“Higher fees in risky areas serve two purposes: they encourage price-sensitive households to choose safer locations, and they also provide local governments with more revenue to upgrade the climate resilience of infrastructure,” Jenny Schuetz and Julia Gill of Brookings write.

Zoning and other land-use regulations, they argue, should be reformed to encourage more dense development in safer places and less sprawl into particularly climate-impacted areas. 

Homeowners and landlords in riskier places also need to do more to retrofit homes to make them more fire and wind proof and more energy efficient. The researchers recommend that local policymakers think more carefully about where to invest infrastructure — including roads, schools, and water and sewage capacity — in climate-impacted areas to either discourage or encourage people to move to certain areas. 

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Recently, as my family cruised up Highway 50 toward Lake Tahoe, we glimpsed the destruction wrought by last summer’s Caldor Fire: charcoal forests up and down the ridges; metal roofs melted into puddles; and chimneys protruding from foundations, some of the more than 1,000 structures destroyed.

The sight shocked us. But it wasn’t the first time we’ve driven past the charred remnants of a megafire. Those have become a part of the West Coast landscape as much as its storied beaches and granite peaks.

For my 10-year-old twins, Didi and Gege, their childhood memories of summer take place against a backdrop of a fire season burning ever hotter, ever longer.

It’s a sickening “here we go again” ritual of checking the air quality before heading outdoors, rearranging or canceling activities, and worrying about the people caught in the crosshairs of wildfires while also wondering if the blaze might reach us too.

hop to get ahead of the fires, some Bay Area friends sent their children to sleepaway camps at the start of summer instead of later, rather than risk choking smoke or the possibility of an evacuation.

At sunset in Tahoe, my family skipped rocks at the beach. Gege found a smooth rock that he decided to pocket, while Didi proudly bounced a rock twice across the water.

View of a charred area in the Sierra Nevada as seen from Highway 50. Photo: Vanessa Hua

On the other side of the lake, smoke from the Washburn Fire in Yosemite National Park was starting to drift into the Tahoe basin, a line of smudge looming over the mountains.

The next day, as the haze thickened, blurring the view, Didi said, “I don’t want to be in a fire! I don’t want my stuff to burn up.”

We assured him that the fire wasn’t nearby, but he and his twin brother have experienced threats closer to home: planned power outages, red flag warnings, a sky that turned orange due to wildfire smoke.

And for a while now, they’ve been complaining about the heat in California.

“Why can’t we go somewhere it’s raining?” Didy asked.

Places that rain in the summer are usually humid, we explained. Then he announced that when he’s an adult, he’s going to move somewhere colder.

That could be in San Francisco or along the coast — if the iconic fog is still around then; it too is at risk due to climate change.

“I like Tahoe better in the winter,” Gege said. “I like the snow. Why didn’t we come more often then?”

It was a dry winter, we said. Trying not to fan the proverbial flames, we didn’t mention that global warming is a threat to the future of the ski industry. This week, Britain reached record highs in a heat wave, with wildfires also sweeping through parts of France and Spain.

As much as parents might want to shield their children from the gloomy forecasts, young people know what’s happening. In a survey released last fall, nearly 60% of the 10,000 respondents — people age 16 to 25 in 10 countries — said they were “very or extremely” worried about climate change.

About 65% of those surveyed agreed that governments are failing young people, while just a little more than a third agreed that governments acted according to science. Countries with the highest percentage of those worried were those already hard hit by the climate crisis, including the Philippines, India and Brazil.

Wildflowers near Carnelian Bay at Lake Tahoe. Photo: Vanessa Hua

Yet despite the havoc humanity wreaks, nature finds ways to persist. At least for now.

As waters receded in Lake Tahoe due to drought, dormant seeds of lupines became exposed and bloomed in a spectacular show in June, reportedly the most abundant since 2015.

On our trip in mid-July, we hiked through pine trees, our family marveling at the red blaze of Indian paintbrush; purple checkerbloom; patches of thimbleberries; and masses of mountain coyote mint, beardtongues, yarrow, bird’s-foot trefoils, and Woods’ roses.

Saying their names felt like an incantation, to protect the wildflowers and call them forth, now and in the future.

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We drove back to her house, near the beach, in the city of Santa Cruz, and Stasiewicz mused on the contrast between our settled way of life and the habits of Indigenous tribes. Native Americans had once moved around seasonally while stewarding their forests by means of controlled burns. Today, perhaps, wildfires and their evacuations are forcing people to return to a semi-nomadic existence. Stasiewicz has friends with respiratory ailments who can’t tolerate the wildfire smoke that now routinely blankets the West Coast; their new seasonal routine is to move to the East Coast during the hottest months.

Some people would say it’s a younger generational mind-set, she said, parking the car. But, she went on, “it’s a way of being resilient. You’re highly adaptable during fire season.” In her trunk, she has an emergency kit with a hand axe, a hard hat, and a seven-day supply of contact lenses. She plans to purchase a chainsaw. “I’m always thinking worst-case scenario,” she said.

In April of 1991, Indigenous people living on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines, noticed a sulfurous smell in the air. It was emerging, along with gusts of steam, from a giant crack that had opened in the mountainside. Scientists set up a monitoring system and concluded that an eruption was likely. Around a million people lived near the mountain, and most of them didn’t know it was a volcano; the government rushed out a public-awareness campaign and created evacuation maps and a five-level system of volcanic-activity alerts. On June 15th, the volcano erupted, unleashing a seventeen-mile-high mushroom-like cloud that sparked lightning. A typhoon happened to be moving through, and pounding rains mixed with fiery, superheated avalanches of gas, ash, and molten rock. The decision-making had been fraught and full of uncertainties; the death toll should have been huge. And yet, by the time of eruption, more than sixty thousand people had departed from the zones of greatest peril, many transported by government-arranged buses and trucks. The main eruptions killed around three hundred and fifty people. The evacuation is now a classic study in the field of disaster-response management.

Ideally, as in the case of Pinatubo, evacuations follow a script. Emergency responders recognize a threat, identify at-risk areas, and call for evacuations using warning systems that function well; residents are notified zone by zone and, after making mental and logistical preparations, escape. But, especially in the case of catastrophic wildfires, the script may be easier described than executed. The problem isn’t mass panic of the sort featured in Hollywood movies—research has shown that such panic at moments of disaster is a myth. Instead, systems can stumble for lack of coördination or testing. Even well-laid plans can’t anticipate how a raging fire will interact with the specifics of landscape, weather, and human behavior. In California and the West, many county emergency managers have therefore opted not to create robust wildfire-evacuation plans, arguing that they can’t address the particulars of a blaze until it’s unfolding before them; they don’t want to be locked into designating certain evacuation routes, for example, in case those get breached by flames. But Cova and other evacuation experts argue that doing as much detailed groundwork as possible in advance is worth it, because the process can reveal problems that weren’t otherwise obvious. There is a tao of evacuation planning: you must spend time developing a detailed plan while acknowledging its limitations, so that you can be better poised to improvise as circumstances demand.

To look at any single wildfire catastrophe is to grasp the huge number of factors that planners and residents must confront both beforehand and in the moment. A prime example is what happened in the town of Paradise, California, in 2018. The town’s managers had had the foresight to craft a wildfire-evacuation plan, identifying egress routes and conducting, in 2016, a community drill. But participation was low, and a few years prior the town had unwisely decided to narrow part of the primary evacuation thoroughfare from four lanes to two. No one anticipated an apocalypse that would overpower all their systems. In November of 2018, state fire officials learned of a fire ignition near the town; within ninety minutes, they’d told the county sheriff to issue evacuation orders for a limited number of areas. But the fire, driven by howling winds, spread at a speed beyond their experience, and they were slow to issue further orders.

As the journalist Lizzie Johnson has reported, in “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire,” a wider evacuation commenced only after an emergency dispatcher for Cal Fire, alarmed by calls from residents, jumped the chain of command to have the sheriff evacuate the entire town. By then, it was too late. Flames engulfed most of the main escape roads, and gridlock ensued as thousands of cars jammed the primary evacuation route, surrounded by flames. Eighty-five people, many elderly and trapped at home, died in what has become known as the Camp Fire—the deadliest inferno in California history.

The Camp Fire was a shocking lesson in threat evaluation. It showed fire officials that they needed to call for evacuations far sooner in extreme wildfires rather than waiting for a more complete picture of the threat. At the same time, it underscored the limits of alerting technology. Officials in Paradise had relied upon an opt-in emergency-messaging system called CodeRED, but only a small proportion of residents register for such systems. Many evacuation experts recommend using a federal Amber Alert-style system, which automatically pings every cell phone in a disaster area, but significant cell-phone infrastructure was soon overloaded or destroyed during the disaster.

Even if people get orders to evacuate, not everyone will quickly follow through. McCaffrey, the U.S. Forest Service researcher, has studied people’s wildfire-evacuation preferences. She and her colleagues have found that in communities in South Carolina, Texas, and Washington State that have experienced wildfires, only one in four people is inclined to leave immediately upon receiving an official evacuation order; two-thirds favor a wait-and-see approach—it’s common, research finds, for people to scan outside for smoke or flames, or check with neighbors or other trusted sources—and roughly one in ten figures that he will stay and fight. Some homeowners, McCaffrey noted, simply feel that they can’t afford to lose their abodes. An intention to leave promptly may founder on last-minute complexities. What if an evacuation order comes when families are scattered at work and school? Does an elderly aunt have to be picked up along the way?

First responders in the C.Z.U. Fire knew about Paradise, and were able to avert a catastrophic loss of lives. Still, on the night the conflagration blew up in Santa Cruz County, they were caught off guard, and some orders were issued too late. “That fire was growing so rapidly, we didn’t know exactly where it was,” Nate Armstrong, who at the time of the disaster was a deputy chief in Cal Fire’s C.Z.U. unit, told me. Heavy smoke made it impossible to get fire-location intel from fire-mapping aircraft. Other factors—poor cell signals, overloaded telecommunications networks, power outages, burned infrastructure—created some alert-system failures. In the off-the-grid community of Last Chance, some people received reverse-911 landline calls after dark—but by then houses were aflame, and one man perished. Other residents, such as the Firebaughs, didn’t see or receive alerts disseminated via social media, CodeRed, or the Amber Alert system in time.

Amid the communications chaos, some people decided to clear out without waiting for word from the authorities. Meanwhile, roughly two dozen sheriff’s deputies started driving around, knocking on doors to tell people to get out; the cops moved systematically from north to south along the San Lorenzo Valley so as to avoid unleashing a simultaneous emptying of the entire area. (By the next day, two hundred officers were engaged in the effort.) Residents also consulted a new online map from a San Francisco-based tech startup called Zonehaven, which allowed the public to track evacuation warnings and orders in real time, without waiting for notifications. Zonehaven’s software is targeted primarily at fire, police, and emergency-services departments, which have traditionally used paper maps to decide on evacuation zones even as fires spread (a process that can take hours); its algorithm analyzes data on geography, population, and housing density, among other factors, and looks at traffic flow, to suggest pre-planned evacuation zones. In the C.Z.U. fire, its début, the Zonehaven platform provided the emergency agencies with what’s known as a common operating picture, helping them manage the evacuation of seventy-seven thousand people over five days. Some thirty counties in California now use Zonehaven, and it was deployed last year in thirty-seven wildfires.

Other new technology tools, such as sensors for detecting fires early, promise to optimize the emergency response and evacuation process further. And yet there are limits to how much a wildfire evacuation can be standardized or perfected. Aggressive, rapidly spreading conflagrations leave little margin for hesitation or error, and uncertainty on the ground is unavoidable. Every person’s evacuation experience is different. This summer, Jo Romaniello, a therapist who set up a Facebook page during the C.Z.U. fire where people could share their experiences, co-authored “The People Not the Fire: Stories of Resilience,” a book containing thirty diverse narratives of the disaster in Boulder Creek, a town in the northern San Lorenzo Valley. Although many people received alerts and had relatively orderly evacuations, some describe learning of the emergency from helicopters flying overhead, broadcasting orders to get out. Others, in areas that burned first, barely escaped the flames: one couple, finding their driveway blocked by fire, made it out in their cars at midnight with nothing but their dogs, the clothes they wore, a purse, and a violin. Romaniello and her husband weren’t registered for CodeRED, and never received a reverse-911 call; they heard about the danger when a friend called them. Unsure when to leave, they packed and evacuated late, at 2:30 A.M., after a deputy drove through their area with a bullhorn. By then, they could hear the roar of the fire. Nearby propane tanks were exploding, and the night sky was blazing red. They drove out into a blizzard of falling ash.

Knowing that Cal Fire was short-staffed and underequipped, a small cadre of people in the Santa Cruz mountains, some with firefighting experience, decided that their best bet was to stay and fight for their homes themselves. (A few had already evacuated with their spouses, children, and animals, but then chose to go back, alone, to their homes.) They used chainsaws, tractors, bulldozers, and other equipment to remove trees and understory, clearing fuel breaks around their property. On Westdale Drive, a private road with thirty-seven houses just south of the Firebaughs’ in Bonny Doon, seven households used makeshift water trucks and fire hoses to extinguish spot fires created by falling embers. The neighborhood later credited the crew with saving it: had the ignitions escalated, flames could have overrun many homes.

Inexperienced wildfire-fighting attempts by civilians can put them in grave danger, and first responders sometimes end up diverted from firefighting as they try to persuade residents to leave. Armstrong, from Cal Fire, told me that fire crews got several property owners out at the last minute, “with the fire right on their heels.” But Stasiewicz believes that people should be provided with guidance on surviving, as a last resort, in their homes or at refuge points, such as local baseball fields or store parking lots. Some ranching communities in the intermountain West have organized their own volunteer firefighting services, in coöperation with state and federal agencies that provide training and radios.

LizAnne Jensen, a former treasurer of the Fire Safe Council of Santa Cruz County, a nonprofit group that helps homeowners with wildfire protection, lives with her husband, Ken, on Westdale Drive, in a beige stucco house next to a studio where they craft and sell copper weathervanes. They have invested more than sixty thousand dollars in home-hardening and fuel-reduction improvements, going so far as to pay for work on neighboring property. On a bright summer day, LizAnne gave me a tour of their home. Wooden gates and fences, she said, can “carry fire right up to your house”; they’d replaced the timber gates leading to their back patio with ones made of polished corrugated steel. Their woodshed had been shielded with metal screen panels to keep out embers, and their doormats were made of metal grating. Their roof, which was covered in brown fire-resistant shingles and trimmed with green-painted metal flashing, was also rigged with sprinklers; a homemade misting system hidden under the eaves was capable of soaking the surrounding ground in minutes. Multiple fire hoses snaked across the small, parched meadow that separated their house and studio from the nearby woods, ready to draw from two tanks holding more than ten thousand gallons of water, or from their fourteen-thousand-gallon swimming pool.

As part of her work with the Fire Safe Council, LizAnne had helped draw up fire-readiness checklists. Whenever it’s red-flag-warning fire weather, she and her husband start working through a four-page series of tasks: agree on a meeting place if they get separated, secure the cats, charge and wear their walkie-talkies, move patio-furniture cushions indoors, sweep the roof and gutters, fuel the generator, and so on. The C.Z.U. fire, she said, had been their third evacuation in a dozen years. She had packed for thirteen hours, then left the house in her S.U.V. at 3:30 A.M. The Jensens hadn’t received an evacuation alert, but it was smoky, and burning embers were falling around them. Ken planned to follow, but first went to pick up an out-of-town neighbor’s cat and bird; at the last minute, he decided to hunker down at home, and teamed up with the other Westdale homeowners to defend their turf.

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We drove back to her house, near the beach, in the city of Santa Cruz, and Stasiewicz mused on the contrast between our settled way of life and the habits of Indigenous tribes. Native Americans had once moved around seasonally while stewarding their forests by means of controlled burns. Today, perhaps, wildfires and their evacuations are forcing people to return to a semi-nomadic existence. Stasiewicz has friends with respiratory ailments who can’t tolerate the wildfire smoke that now routinely blankets the West Coast; their new seasonal routine is to move to the East Coast during the hottest months.

Some people would say it’s a younger generational mind-set, she said, parking the car. But, she went on, “it’s a way of being resilient. You’re highly adaptable during fire season.” In her trunk, she has an emergency kit with a hand axe, a hard hat, and a seven-day supply of contact lenses. She plans to purchase a chainsaw. “I’m always thinking worst-case scenario,” she said.

In April of 1991, Indigenous people living on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines, noticed a sulfurous smell in the air. It was emerging, along with gusts of steam, from a giant crack that had opened in the mountainside. Scientists set up a monitoring system and concluded that an eruption was likely. Around a million people lived near the mountain, and most of them didn’t know it was a volcano; the government rushed out a public-awareness campaign and created evacuation maps and a five-level system of volcanic-activity alerts. On June 15th, the volcano erupted, unleashing a seventeen-mile-high mushroom-like cloud that sparked lightning. A typhoon happened to be moving through, and pounding rains mixed with fiery, superheated avalanches of gas, ash, and molten rock. The decision-making had been fraught and full of uncertainties; the death toll should have been huge. And yet, by the time of eruption, more than sixty thousand people had departed from the zones of greatest peril, many transported by government-arranged buses and trucks. The main eruptions killed around three hundred and fifty people. The evacuation is now a classic study in the field of disaster-response management.

Ideally, as in the case of Pinatubo, evacuations follow a script. Emergency responders recognize a threat, identify at-risk areas, and call for evacuations using warning systems that function well; residents are notified zone by zone and, after making mental and logistical preparations, escape. But, especially in the case of catastrophic wildfires, the script may be easier described than executed. The problem isn’t mass panic of the sort featured in Hollywood movies—research has shown that such panic at moments of disaster is a myth. Instead, systems can stumble for lack of coördination or testing. Even well-laid plans can’t anticipate how a raging fire will interact with the specifics of landscape, weather, and human behavior. In California and the West, many county emergency managers have therefore opted not to create robust wildfire-evacuation plans, arguing that they can’t address the particulars of a blaze until it’s unfolding before them; they don’t want to be locked into designating certain evacuation routes, for example, in case those get breached by flames. But Cova and other evacuation experts argue that doing as much detailed groundwork as possible in advance is worth it, because the process can reveal problems that weren’t otherwise obvious. There is a tao of evacuation planning: you must spend time developing a detailed plan while acknowledging its limitations, so that you can be better poised to improvise as circumstances demand.

To look at any single wildfire catastrophe is to grasp the huge number of factors that planners and residents must confront both beforehand and in the moment. A prime example is what happened in the town of Paradise, California, in 2018. The town’s managers had had the foresight to craft a wildfire-evacuation plan, identifying egress routes and conducting, in 2016, a community drill. But participation was low, and a few years prior the town had unwisely decided to narrow part of the primary evacuation thoroughfare from four lanes to two. No one anticipated an apocalypse that would overpower all their systems. In November of 2018, state fire officials learned of a fire ignition near the town; within ninety minutes, they’d told the county sheriff to issue evacuation orders for a limited number of areas. But the fire, driven by howling winds, spread at a speed beyond their experience, and they were slow to issue further orders.

As the journalist Lizzie Johnson has reported, in “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire,” a wider evacuation commenced only after an emergency dispatcher for Cal Fire, alarmed by calls from residents, jumped the chain of command to have the sheriff evacuate the entire town. By then, it was too late. Flames engulfed most of the main escape roads, and gridlock ensued as thousands of cars jammed the primary evacuation route, surrounded by flames. Eighty-five people, many elderly and trapped at home, died in what has become known as the Camp Fire—the deadliest inferno in California history.

The Camp Fire was a shocking lesson in threat evaluation. It showed fire officials that they needed to call for evacuations far sooner in extreme wildfires rather than waiting for a more complete picture of the threat. At the same time, it underscored the limits of alerting technology. Officials in Paradise had relied upon an opt-in emergency-messaging system called CodeRED, but only a small proportion of residents register for such systems. Many evacuation experts recommend using a federal Amber Alert-style system, which automatically pings every cell phone in a disaster area, but significant cell-phone infrastructure was soon overloaded or destroyed during the disaster.

Even if people get orders to evacuate, not everyone will quickly follow through. McCaffrey, the U.S. Forest Service researcher, has studied people’s wildfire-evacuation preferences. She and her colleagues have found that in communities in South Carolina, Texas, and Washington State that have experienced wildfires, only one in four people is inclined to leave immediately upon receiving an official evacuation order; two-thirds favor a wait-and-see approach—it’s common, research finds, for people to scan outside for smoke or flames, or check with neighbors or other trusted sources—and roughly one in ten figures that he will stay and fight. Some homeowners, McCaffrey noted, simply feel that they can’t afford to lose their abodes. An intention to leave promptly may founder on last-minute complexities. What if an evacuation order comes when families are scattered at work and school? Does an elderly aunt have to be picked up along the way?

First responders in the C.Z.U. Fire knew about Paradise, and were able to avert a catastrophic loss of lives. Still, on the night the conflagration blew up in Santa Cruz County, they were caught off guard, and some orders were issued too late. “That fire was growing so rapidly, we didn’t know exactly where it was,” Nate Armstrong, who at the time of the disaster was a deputy chief in Cal Fire’s C.Z.U. unit, told me. Heavy smoke made it impossible to get fire-location intel from fire-mapping aircraft. Other factors—poor cell signals, overloaded telecommunications networks, power outages, burned infrastructure—created some alert-system failures. In the off-the-grid community of Last Chance, some people received reverse-911 landline calls after dark—but by then houses were aflame, and one man perished. Other residents, such as the Firebaughs, didn’t see or receive alerts disseminated via social media, CodeRed, or the Amber Alert system in time.

Amid the communications chaos, some people decided to clear out without waiting for word from the authorities. Meanwhile, roughly two dozen sheriff’s deputies started driving around, knocking on doors to tell people to get out; the cops moved systematically from north to south along the San Lorenzo Valley so as to avoid unleashing a simultaneous emptying of the entire area. (By the next day, two hundred officers were engaged in the effort.) Residents also consulted a new online map from a San Francisco-based tech startup called Zonehaven, which allowed the public to track evacuation warnings and orders in real time, without waiting for notifications. Zonehaven’s software is targeted primarily at fire, police, and emergency-services departments, which have traditionally used paper maps to decide on evacuation zones even as fires spread (a process that can take hours); its algorithm analyzes data on geography, population, and housing density, among other factors, and looks at traffic flow, to suggest pre-planned evacuation zones. In the C.Z.U. fire, its début, the Zonehaven platform provided the emergency agencies with what’s known as a common operating picture, helping them manage the evacuation of seventy-seven thousand people over five days. Some thirty counties in California now use Zonehaven, and it was deployed last year in thirty-seven wildfires.

Other new technology tools, such as sensors for detecting fires early, promise to optimize the emergency response and evacuation process further. And yet there are limits to how much a wildfire evacuation can be standardized or perfected. Aggressive, rapidly spreading conflagrations leave little margin for hesitation or error, and uncertainty on the ground is unavoidable. Every person’s evacuation experience is different. This summer, Jo Romaniello, a therapist who set up a Facebook page during the C.Z.U. fire where people could share their experiences, co-authored “The People Not the Fire: Stories of Resilience,” a book containing thirty diverse narratives of the disaster in Boulder Creek, a town in the northern San Lorenzo Valley. Although many people received alerts and had relatively orderly evacuations, some describe learning of the emergency from helicopters flying overhead, broadcasting orders to get out. Others, in areas that burned first, barely escaped the flames: one couple, finding their driveway blocked by fire, made it out in their cars at midnight with nothing but their dogs, the clothes they wore, a purse, and a violin. Romaniello and her husband weren’t registered for CodeRED, and never received a reverse-911 call; they heard about the danger when a friend called them. Unsure when to leave, they packed and evacuated late, at 2:30 A.M., after a deputy drove through their area with a bullhorn. By then, they could hear the roar of the fire. Nearby propane tanks were exploding, and the night sky was blazing red. They drove out into a blizzard of falling ash.

Knowing that Cal Fire was short-staffed and underequipped, a small cadre of people in the Santa Cruz mountains, some with firefighting experience, decided that their best bet was to stay and fight for their homes themselves. (A few had already evacuated with their spouses, children, and animals, but then chose to go back, alone, to their homes.) They used chainsaws, tractors, bulldozers, and other equipment to remove trees and understory, clearing fuel breaks around their property. On Westdale Drive, a private road with thirty-seven houses just south of the Firebaughs’ in Bonny Doon, seven households used makeshift water trucks and fire hoses to extinguish spot fires created by falling embers. The neighborhood later credited the crew with saving it: had the ignitions escalated, flames could have overrun many homes.

Inexperienced wildfire-fighting attempts by civilians can put them in grave danger, and first responders sometimes end up diverted from firefighting as they try to persuade residents to leave. Armstrong, from Cal Fire, told me that fire crews got several property owners out at the last minute, “with the fire right on their heels.” But Stasiewicz believes that people should be provided with guidance on surviving, as a last resort, in their homes or at refuge points, such as local baseball fields or store parking lots. Some ranching communities in the intermountain West have organized their own volunteer firefighting services, in coöperation with state and federal agencies that provide training and radios.

LizAnne Jensen, a former treasurer of the Fire Safe Council of Santa Cruz County, a nonprofit group that helps homeowners with wildfire protection, lives with her husband, Ken, on Westdale Drive, in a beige stucco house next to a studio where they craft and sell copper weathervanes. They have invested more than sixty thousand dollars in home-hardening and fuel-reduction improvements, going so far as to pay for work on neighboring property. On a bright summer day, LizAnne gave me a tour of their home. Wooden gates and fences, she said, can “carry fire right up to your house”; they’d replaced the timber gates leading to their back patio with ones made of polished corrugated steel. Their woodshed had been shielded with metal screen panels to keep out embers, and their doormats were made of metal grating. Their roof, which was covered in brown fire-resistant shingles and trimmed with green-painted metal flashing, was also rigged with sprinklers; a homemade misting system hidden under the eaves was capable of soaking the surrounding ground in minutes. Multiple fire hoses snaked across the small, parched meadow that separated their house and studio from the nearby woods, ready to draw from two tanks holding more than ten thousand gallons of water, or from their fourteen-thousand-gallon swimming pool.

As part of her work with the Fire Safe Council, LizAnne had helped draw up fire-readiness checklists. Whenever it’s red-flag-warning fire weather, she and her husband start working through a four-page series of tasks: agree on a meeting place if they get separated, secure the cats, charge and wear their walkie-talkies, move patio-furniture cushions indoors, sweep the roof and gutters, fuel the generator, and so on. The C.Z.U. fire, she said, had been their third evacuation in a dozen years. She had packed for thirteen hours, then left the house in her S.U.V. at 3:30 A.M. The Jensens hadn’t received an evacuation alert, but it was smoky, and burning embers were falling around them. Ken planned to follow, but first went to pick up an out-of-town neighbor’s cat and bird; at the last minute, he decided to hunker down at home, and teamed up with the other Westdale homeowners to defend their turf.

The post The Terrifying Decisions Created by Wildfires appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

There have been reports of over 28 major fires across California that experienced a historic heat wave with 14,000 firefighters fighting the fires.

On Wednesday, high winds blew smoke and ash from northern parts of the state, causing residents of the San Francisco area to wake up to dark skies, some thinking it was still night.

In California, wildfires burned more than 2.5 million acres this year. As the fires continue to burn, forecasters expect similar conditions in the coming days.

Firefighters sit in the back of a fire truck on the Enterprise Bridge

Photo: Josh Edelson

Cars drive along the San Francisco Bay Bridge under an orange, smoke-filled sky at lunchtime in San Francisco.

Photo: Harold Postic

The San Francisco Bay Bridge and the city skyline are shrouded in orange smoke.

Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small

Police and fire brigade wait on the Enterprise Bridge.

Photo: Josh Edelson

The post California wildfires flip skies orange appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

People who live in the scenic woodlands of Northern California faced a weekend of fear as forest fires threatened to devastate thousands of homes.

The Dixie Fire, which burned much of the gold rush town of Greenville, threatened more than 10,000 buildings in the northern Sierra Nevada. It had engulfed an area larger than the size of New York City.

It was the largest current wildland fire in the country and the third largest in recorded California history, according to the State Department of Fire and Forestry Protection.

Wind-blown flames destroyed dozens of homes and most of downtown Greenville on Wednesday and Thursday, and also badly damaged Canyondam, a hamlet of about three dozen residents. The fire reached Chester, but crews managed to protect homes and businesses there, officials said.

Charlene Mays kept her Chester gas station open as long as possible and urged tired firefighters not to apologize for the ash trail their boots had left on the ground. But when the small town on the northwest shore of Lake Almanor lost power, Mays decided it was time for them to leave.

She ran home to get a box of valuables, including her husband’s class ring and some jewelry. The smoke was so thick it was hard to breathe. Lumps of ash broke when they hit the floor, making a sound like broken glass.

That was two days ago. Since then, Mays has lived in the car park at Lassen College in Susanville. Her husband stayed behind to service some of the water tanks that the firefighters were using. It’s just her, a Miniature Pinscher Chihuahua named Jedidiah and a Pit Bull named Bear.

Her house was still standing on Friday, but her fate was tied to the direction of the wind. She wasn’t alone.

“I have probably 30 of my regular customers here,” she said.

The Dixie Fire, named for the street it began on, now covers an area of ​​1,760 square kilometers and was only 21% contained. No injuries or deaths were reported.

The weather at the fireplace on Saturday was expected to have higher humidity and calmer winds with temperatures in excess of 32 degrees Celsius instead of the 40 miles per hour (64 km / h) gusts recorded at the beginning of the week and three-digit highs.

Still, the fire and its neighboring fires, which were only a few hundred miles apart, posed an ongoing threat.

Heat waves and historic droughts related to climate change have made fighting forest fires in the American West difficult. Scientists say climate change has made the region much warmer and drier over the past 30 years, and the weather will continue to be more extreme and forest fires more frequent and more destructive.

Near the Klamath National Forest, firefighters kept an eye out for small communities evacuated on the trail of the antelope fire, which had previously ignited 30-meter-high flames as it blackened bone-dry grass, scrub and wood. It was only included 20%.

Farther northwest, around 500 homes scattered in and around Shasta-Trinity National Forest remained threatened by the Monument Fire and others by the McFarland Fire, both of which were triggered by thunderstorms last week, firefighters said.

About a two-hour drive south of the Dixie Fire, crews had encircled about a third of the River Fire that broke out near the city of Colfax on Wednesday and destroyed nearly 90 homes and other buildings. Evacuations for thousands of people in the Nevada and Placer counties were lifted Friday. Authorities said three people, including a firefighter, were injured.

Dale Huber went to the fire zone on Friday to check on his brother’s house, which was in ruins.

“It used to be a bunch of cool things, and now it’s just rubbish,” said Huber. “You can’t fix it. We can rip it out and start over or run away. I think he decided to rebuild here. “

Smoke from the fires covered central California and western Nevada, causing air quality to deteriorate to very unhealthy levels. Air quality warnings stretched across the San Joaquin Valley and into the San Francisco Bay Area, where residents were told to keep their windows and doors closed.

California is well on its way to surpassing the last year that had the worst fire season in recent recorded state history. Since the beginning of the year, more than 6,000 fires have destroyed more than 3,260 square kilometers of land – more than three times the losses for the same period in 2020, according to state fire numbers.

California’s raging forest fires were among more than 100 large, active fires that burned in 14 states, mostly in the west, where historic drought conditions have left the land ripe and ripe for ignition.

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The death toll from a massive fire that swept through the mountain communities of Butte, Plumas and Yuba counties has risen to 10, and 16 people remain missing, fire officials said Thursday evening.

The North Complex fire mushroomed in size this week, scorching a total of more than 252,000 acres and forcing some 20,000 residents in Plumas, Butte and Yuba counties from their homes. Officials said the bodies of seven more people were found Thursday as they searched through hamlets where the fire burned.

A hand crew was overrun by flames in the fire’s West Zone in Butte County, which had become extremely unpredictable due to erratic weather changes. The crew was able to escape, but two firefighters suffered minor injuries.

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Lance Georgeson of Mammoth Lakes paddleboards on Tenaya Lake on Sept. 13 in Yosemite National Park. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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Thick smoke from multiple forest fires shrouds iconic El Capitan, right, and the walls of Yosemite Valley. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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Benjamin Lewis takes a photo for a group of San Diego firefighters in Yosemite. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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A deer grazes in Cook’s Meadow as thick smoke shrouds the iconic landmarks of Yosemite Valley. 

(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)

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Thick smoke shrouds iconic Half Dome towering over Yosemite Valley in a view from Sentinel Bridge over the Merced River on Sept. 13. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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Thick smoke shrouds Tenaya Lake on Sept. 13 in Yosemite National Park. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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A Cal Fire truck passes a burned-out vehicle on Stringtown Road on Friday in Oroville, Calif. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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Propane gas burns Friday at the ruins of a home on Zink Road in the Berry Creek area of Butte County. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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Melted goggles lie on the ground next to the burned-out truck on Stringtown Road. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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A crew from Trinity River Conservation Camp, a prison facility, does mop-up work on Stringtown Road on Friday, the day after a flare-up in the area. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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Scorched cars in Brush Creek, Calif. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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A firefighter battles the Creek fire as it threatens homes in Madera County. 

(Noah Berger / Associated Press)

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Flames from the Bear fire in Oroville, Calif. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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A horse in a field in Butte County. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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Frank Martinez, left, and Rick Wolfe with their nine dogs in Oroville, Calif. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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A fox pauses amid burned brush in Butte County. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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A statue is singed in Butte County. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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Lake Oroville in Butte County. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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Firefighters work to save a home in Butte County. 

(Noah Berger / Associated Press)

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A burned truck in Butte County. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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A firefighter battles the Creek fire in Madera County. 

(Noah Berger / Associated Press)

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A plume rises from the Bear fire as it burns along Lake Oroville in Butte County. 

(Noah Berger / Associated Press)

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A table stands outside the destroyed Cressman’s General Store in Fresno County. 

(Noah Berger / Associated Press)

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A vehicle streaks by as Fresno County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeffery Shipman stands along California 168, with the Creek fire in the background on Sept. 6.  

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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The Laguna Hotshots Crew out of the Cleveland National Forest battles the Creek fire as it approaches the Southern California Edison Big Creek Hydroelectric Plant on Sept. 6 in Big Creek, Calif. 

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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Members of the Laguna Hotshots Crew walk down Huntington Lake Road to battle the Creek fire on Sept. 6. 

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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A member of the Laguna Hotshots Crew is silhouetted against a background of flames. 

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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The Creek fire burns along Huntington Lake Road on Sept. 6. 

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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A vehicle streaks along California 168 as the Creek fire creeps closer to Shaver Lake, Calif., on Sept. 6. 

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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A member of the Laguna Hotshots Crew battles the Creek fire on Sept. 6.  

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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A firefighter conducts a back-burn operation along California 168 as the Creek fire approaches the Shaver Lake Marina. 

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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Firefighter Ricardo Gomez sets a back burn amid the Creek fire near Shaver Lake Marina on Sept. 6.  

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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A firefighter works on the back-burn operation near Shaver Lake Marina. 

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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A duck swims in Shaver Lake as the Creek fire approaches on Sept. 6.  

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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Firefighter Ricardo Gomez battles the Creek fire with a back burn. 

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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The sky glows orange around Shaver Lake on Sept. 6. 

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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A firefighter conducts a back-burn operation amid the Creek fire near Shaver Lake on Sept. 6. 

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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Flames leap into the sky as fire engulfs trees near Shaver Lake. 

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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The Creek fire approaches the Shaver Lake Marina on Sept. 6.  

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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Firefighter Ricardo Gomez sets a back burn amid the Creek fire near Shaver Lake Marina on Sept. 6.  

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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A man stands on a dock at the Shaver Lake Marina as the Creek fire approaches on Sept. 6.  

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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Flames consume dry brush around Santa Barbara firefighters as they set a backfire along Oro Quincy Highway in the aftermath of the Bear fire in Oroville. 

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

The North Complex was one of the fires that exploded in size this week as record-high temperatures and strong winds beset the state. Flames raced through the northern Sierra Nevada foothills before dawn Wednesday — catching crews and residents off-guard as they leaped southwest toward towns in Butte County, including the community of Paradise, which was largely destroyed by the 2018 Camp fire.

Steve Kaufmann, a spokesman for the fire’s response team, said 2,000 structures have been destroyed or damaged, though that number may increase after crews further assess the area Friday.

So much smoke enveloped the region that it shaded the fire from the sun, reducing temperatures and increasing the humidity Thursday, according to an incident meteorologist. Though the smoke impedes firefighters’ aircraft response, it has helped with the firefight slightly. As of Thursday evening, the North Complex fire is 23% contained.

The incident is now the 10th-largest wildfire in state history, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Wildfires have burned more than 3.1 million acres statewide this year — the largest amount on record. At least 19 people have died and thousands of structures have been destroyed.

Cal Fire spokesman Daniel Berlant said dangerously dry conditions led “to explosive fires that have really just skyrocketed us past the 3-million mark for the first time in our recorded history.”

“Unfortunately, with several more months of fire season to go, this number could continue to increase,” he said Thursday.

The Dolan fire, which ignited Aug. 18 north of Limekiln State Park in Monterey County, has also seen extreme growth this week. Officials said the combination of high temperatures, dry fuels and wind combined to more than triple the size of the fire, to more than 111,000 acres.

The fire also has spread to the Army’s Ft. Hunter Liggett, though that property has not been forced to evacuate, officials said.

Near the Oregon border, the Slater fire has grown to 120,000 acres since it ignited Monday in the Klamath National Forest. The fire is threatening the communities of O’Brien, Takilma, Cave Junction and Gasquet, and destroyed 150 structures in Happy Camp.

Embers fly across a roadway as the Bear fire burns in Oroville.

(Noah Berger/Associated Press)

While the mid-August lightning siege set California on the path toward a historic and horrifyingly active fire season, a second salvo of summer infernos has since pushed the toll to more devastating heights.

The unprecedented firestorm prompted the U.S. Forest Service on Wednesday to temporarily close all national forests in California.

Many officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have said the effects of climate change have helped set the stage for this year’s prolific fire season.

“I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers,” he said Tuesday.

“You may not believe it intellectually,” he added. “But your own eyes, your own experiences, tell a different story.”

So far this year, almost 7,700 fires have ignited statewide, according to Berlant.

“This year has already been a very destructive fire season, and it is nowhere close to being over,” he said Wednesday.

Six of the state’s 20 largest wildfires have started in the past month or so, according to Cal Fire. That includes the August Complex, which has burned an all-time record 471,185 acres in a remote area in and around Tehama County.

The smoldering remains of a structure along Auberry Road, where the Creek fire tore through and jumped Highway 168 in Fresno County.

(Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

That complex — which started Aug. 17 as a cluster of 37 distinct fires in the Mendocino National Forest — was 24% contained as of Thursday. The most recent acreage figure pushed it well past the 2018 Mendocino Complex fire, which burned more than 459,000 acres.

Crews have almost completely hemmed in the SCU Lightning and LNU Lightning complexes, which rank as the third- and fourth-largest wildfires in state history, at 396,624 and 363,220 acres, respectively.

The SCU complex — which began as a collection of about 20 blazes in Contra Costa, Alameda, Santa Clara, Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties — is now 98% contained. Containment is at 95% for the LNU complex, which has charred parts of Napa, Sonoma, Lake, Solano, Yolo and Colusa counties.

Joining those complexes on the distressing leaderboard is the Elkhorn fire, which is burning in the Mendocino, Shasta-Trinity and Six Rivers national forests. It has scorched 255,309 acres — the ninth-largest burn zone — and was 27% contained as of Thursday.

Firefighters conduct a back burn operation along Highway 68 during the Creek fire as it approaches the Shaver Lake Marina.

(Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

The massive Creek fire, which has chewed through more than 175,000 acres, destroyed an estimated 360 structures and prompted widespread evacuations in the Sierra foothills northeast of Fresno, is currently the 17th-largest in state history.

The fire caused an explosion in China Peak Mountain Resort, igniting a bunker of explosives that were used for avalanche mitigation, Fresno sheriff’s officials said. There was some damage to the resort, but no one was injured.

As is the case for the North Complex fire, the layer of smoke over the Creek fire has helped improve weather conditions. Milder winds and temperatures allowed firefighters to make progress for the first time, increasing the fire’s containment to 6%.

“We’re really trying to start gaining containment on this fire,” said Chris Vestal, a spokesman for the Creek fire response. “A lot of what we want to do is make sure everything that is standing stays standing.”

Firefighters also made progress with the fast-growing Bobcat fire, which doubled in size in one day to nearly 24,000 acres. The fire burning in the San Gabriel Mountains is now 6% contained, according to an incident report. The fire’s growth was largely in the northeast direction Thursday, sparing foothill residential communities.

The Transamerica Pyramid and Salesforce Tower in San Francisco are shrouded by wildfire smoke.

(Eric Risberg / Associated Press )

Six areas remain under an evacuation warning: Duarte, Bradbury, Monrovia, Sierra Madre, Pasadena and Altadena.

Near Yucaipa, the El Dorado fire had burned almost 14,000 acres and was 31% contained as of Thursday morning. Though there’s no current threat to communities in Big Bear Valley, Cal Fire officials issued an advisory asking visitors to postpone visits to the area in case evacuations are ordered.

In San Diego County near the Mexican border, the Valley fire grew to 17,665 acres and was 35% contained, according to Cal Fire. Officials were reporting 15% containment for the 1,300-acre Willow fire, which sparked north of Smartsville in Yuba County on Wednesday. That fire has destroyed 30 structures, according to Cal Fire, while 700 others are considered threatened.

A firefighter watches flames ignite a tree as fire continues to spread at the Bear fire in Oroville.

(Josh Edelson / AFP )

The hope is that weather conditions will “improve across the state today, with most areas experiencing seasonal temperatures and dry conditions,” according to Cal Fire.

“Northern California should expect average temperatures through the weekend, with a possible cooling trend next week,” officials wrote in a statewide situation update Thursday. “In Southern California, temperatures will be at or slightly above normal.”

That would be a boon to firefighters, who have had to contend with a pair of scorching heat waves in the past few weeks. UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said that last month was “the warmest August on record in California.”

With fires raging throughout the West Coast, the skies over California have taken an apocalyptic turn — choking the air with ash and smoke in some regions, while snuffing out sunlight in others. Rarely have so many Californians breathed such unhealthy air.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District is warning that smoke and ash are likely to hit much of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties Thursday due to the two major fires locally and smoke flowing in from Northern California blazes.

The air district’s smoke advisory said that most of the Southern California region will be affected by smoke, with the highest readings of fine-particle pollution, tiny lung-damaging particles known as PM2.5, in areas closest to the Bobcat and El Dorado fires.

Smoke blowing in from Northern California “may also contribute to widespread elevated PM2.5 concentrations,” the air district said, but due to shifting winds, the smoke impacts “will be highly variable in both space and time.”

The air district said to expect “noticeable smoke and ash impacts” in southwest Los Angeles County, Orange County and southwest Riverside County.

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Brooks Hubbard with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers takes photos from the historic North Broadway Bridge over the Los Angeles River Tuesday morning as smoke and ash from the Bobcat fire cloak the area. 

(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)

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Elijah Simpson practices shooting hoops against a backdrop of smokey skies from the Bobcat Fire at Angel’s Gate Park in the San Pedro on September 16, 2020.  

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

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A helicopter fights the Bobcat fire burning dangerously close to Mt. Wilson Observatory. 

(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)

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An aerial view of Dodger Stadium and the downtown Los Angeles skyline at sunset is obscured by smoke, ash and smog on Sept. 14. 

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

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Visitors check their photos at Griffith Observatory with a smoky view of the Hollywood sign behind them. 

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

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Two people get ready to surf as a hazy red sun sets off Hermosa Beach. 

(Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times)

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Smoke from the Bobcat fire burning in the Angeles National Forest blankets the Southland. 

(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)

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An airplane flies through smoky skies in downtown Los Angeles. 

(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)

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A smoky haze envelopes Santa Monica Beach.  

(Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times)

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Beachgoers walk along the shoreline in Laguna Beach beneath a hazy sky. 

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

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A crow on a cypress tree in Garden Grove is silhouetted by a sun obscured by ash from Southland wildfires. 

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

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The sky is gray over the Santa Monica Pier as a family plays in the breakwater.  

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

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A man walks his dog past the historic lifeguard tower in Laguna Beach as the sun is obscured by smoke from wildfires. 

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

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An upbeat message on the South Coast Cinemas marquee in Laguna Beach is dimmed by the smoky air. 

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

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Surfers near the Manhattan Beach Pier under a smoky sunset. 

(Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times)

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Gray skies over the Santa Monica Pier.  

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

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A hazy sun is seen behind the Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove. 

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

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Despite the unhealthful air quality, Fabian Ortez of Riverside enjoys an afternoon of fishing off the pier in Seal Beach. 

(Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times)

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The Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove. 

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

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A bicyclist travels along the 1st Street Bridge as smoke hovers east of downtown Los Angeles. 

(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

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Haze from the Bobcat fire looms over Azusa as it burns in Angeles National Forest. 

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

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The Los Angeles skyline is shrouded in smoke from the Bobcat fire as seen from the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. 

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

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Haze from the Bobcat fire looms over Kare Park in Irwindale. 

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

The bad air is being generated by fires raging in California, Oregon and Washington that are lofting smoke into the air in a massive plume that is blanketing the entire West Coast and extends far out into the Pacific.

But in Southern California much of that smoke has remained aloft. At the ground level, air quality remained in the “good” to “moderate” range Thursday morning across most of the region, except for areas near the Bobcat fire in the Angeles National Forest north of Azusa and Glendora, and the El Dorado fire in the San Bernardino Mountains near Yucaipa, where readings showed air quality in the “unhealthy” range.

Air quality has been significantly worse in Northern California, where raging fires this week have choked the air with smoke and ash and snuffed out the sunlight, casting a gloomy, orange pall over San Francisco and other areas. Air monitoring data Thursday morning showed unhealthy pollution levels in most of San Francisco and in other parts of the Bay Area.

Times staff writers Anita Chabria, Matthew Ormseth and Joe Mozingo contributed to this report.

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One of the 28 major fires ravaging California has officially become the largest blaze in the state’s history.  

The August Complex, which started as more than 30 separate fires in the Mendocino National Forest on August 17, has since burned more than 471,000 acres in and around Tehama County – surpassing the 2018 Mendocino Complex fire.  

The complex- which is just 24 percent contained – has destroyed more than 26 structures and killed at least one person. It secured the title of California’s largest-ever fire on Thursday, as the state weathers its worst most destructive year on record.  

More than 100 wildfires are currently raging across 12 western states, scorching more than 3.4 million acres and leaving seven people dead in California, Oregon and Washington. 

At least five towns have been razed by blazes ripping across the drought-stricken West Coast as hundreds of thousands of people are evacuated under apocalyptic skies stained orange and red by smoke.  

The fast-moving fires have already claimed the lives of seven people who failed to flee before flames engulfed their communities. 

In Washington state, a one-year-old boy named Uriel was killed and his parents Jake and Jamie Hyland were severely burned when they were trapped by the Cold Springs Fire in Okanogan County. 

In Oregon, 12-year-old Wyatt Tofte and his grandmother Peggy Mosso died in a blaze in the Santiam Valley community of Lyons, about 50 miles south of Portland. The boy’s mother is currently in hospital in critical condition after suffering serious burns.

Another person was killed by the Alameda Fire 250 miles away in Ashland – as Oregon Governor Kate Brown warned: ‘This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history.’ 

In California, three people died when the Bear Fire swept through Butte County on Tuesday night.  

Dramatic aerial photographs captured the massive destruction wrought by wildfires across all three states – while drone footage showed San Francisco sitting under a stunning orange haze blanketed by smoke. 

Scroll down for video 

The August Complex in Northern California became the largest fire in the state’s history on Thursday. Firefighers are seen battling the blaze in its first week on August 23

The map above shows 103 fires that have already burned more than 3.4 million acres across the western United States

Butte county firefighters watch as flames tower over their truck during the Bear Fire in Oroville, California, on Wednesday

At least five towns have been razed by blazes ripping across the drought-stricken West Coast as hundreds of thousands of people are evacuated. Pictured: Two young children look at a charred bicycle in Phoenix, Oregon, after a fire ripped through

The Reyes family looks at the destruction of their home at Coleman Creek Estates mobile home park in Phoenix, Oregon

Drone footage captured the eerie orange haze hanging over San Francisco as two massive fires loom nearby 

Jake and Jamie Hyland were severely burned and their one-year-old son Uriel was killed as the family fled from a wildfire in Okanogan County, Washington, on Sunday night

Wyatt Tofte, 12, (far left) and his grandmother Peggy Mosso (far right in red) died in a wildfire burning near the Santiam Valley community of Lyons, about 50 miles south of Portland. The boy’s mother is currently in hospital in critical condition

MEDFORD, OREGON: Northridge Terrace is seen left in September 2019 and right after it was razed by this week’s West Coast wildfires which have ravaged communities and brought apocalyptic orange skies 

TALENT, OREGON: Mountain View Estates in September 2019 (left) and September 2020 (right) after the massive wildfires. Only ‘smoldering ruins’ remained of large parts of the town of Talent, local resident Sandra Spelliscy said 

MEDFORD, OREGON: These satellite images show the destruction in western Oregon where officials fear more deaths

PHOENIX, OREGON: A close-up of the city of 4,500 people which has been devastated by the Alameda Fire 

TALENT, OREGON: The Rogue Valley Highway 99 in June 2018 (left) and on Wednesday this week (right) 

OREGON COAST: A satellite image of the state’s Pacific coast in December 2016 (left) and September 2020 (right) 

PHOENIX, OREGON: This infrared satellite image shows an overview of the destruction, with burned vegetation and property in black and grey, and healthy vegetation that has not been burned in red 

One-year-old boy is killed and his parents are severely burned as they fled Washington wildfire

Jake and Jamie Hyland and their infant son Uriel were evacuating their property in rural Okanogan at around midnight on Sunday when they got trapped by the Cold Springs Fire. 

The family’s scorched truck was found abandoned on Tuesday afternoon, before search teams discovered Jake and Jamie, who is pregnant, gravely injured on the banks of the Columbia River. Baby Uri was already dead. 

The parents were transported to Three Rivers Hospital in Brewster before being airlifted to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. 

Jamie, 26, suffered burns covering 40 to 50 percent of her body and underwent surgery on her arms, a relative wrote on a GoFundMe page.  

Jake, 31, was burned on 25 percent of his body and was preparing for surgery on his arms as well.    

‘They are both still critical at this point, but Jamie is more so than Jake,’ the relative wrote.   

The Hyland family, who live outside Portland in Renton, had been visiting their house in Okanogan for Labor Day weekend. 

The relative said the remote property doesn’t have cell service, so it’s possible the family didn’t receive alerts about the fire blazing toward them until it was too late to evacuate safely.  

The Cold Springs Fire erupted near Omak on Sunday night and has already torched more than 163,000 acres. It was 10 percent contained as of Wednesday night. 

The cause of the fire has not been determined, but Okanogan County Sheriff Tony Hawley said Uri’s death will be treated as a homicide if it turns out to be an arson.  

Hawley praised the efforts of firefighters battling blazes around his community but expressed frustration with a lack of resources. 

He attributed aid delays to the fact that dozens of wildfires are currently burning across the state of Washington and around the western US. 

‘We’re competing for resources just like everyone across the nation,’ he said.  

Across the United States wildfires have burned nearly 4.7 million acres in 2020, the highest year-to-date area since 2018, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Most of the fires are in western states, where 17 new large blazes were reported on Wednesday, bringing the total to 90 that have burned more than 3.4 million acres – an area nearly the size of Connecticut.

Only ‘smoldering ruins’ remained of large parts of the town of Talent, Oregon, said local resident Sandra Spelliscy. 

‘There are numerous neighborhoods where there are no structures left standing… dozens of homes [gone] and literally nothing except the skeletons of a chimney or an appliance,’ she said. 

Firefighters retreated from uncontrollable blazes in Oregon as officials gave residents ‘go now’ orders to evacuate, meaning they had only minutes to leave their homes.

‘It was like driving through hell,’ Jody Evans told local television station NewsChannel21 after a midnight evacuation from Detroit, about 50 miles west of Salem. 

In Okanogan County, Washington, the Hyland family got trapped by the Cold Springs Fire as they evacuated their property near Omak on Sunday night.  

The family’s scorched truck was found abandoned on the side of a road on Tuesday afternoon, before search and rescue teams discovered dad Jake and mom Jamie, who is pregnant, gravely injured on the banks of the Columbia River. Their one-year-old son Uri was already dead.

Jamie, 26, suffered burns covering 40 to 50 percent of her body and underwent surgery on her arms, a relative wrote in on a GoFundMe page.  

Jake, 31, was burned on 25 percent of his body and was preparing for surgery on his arms as well.  

To the south in Butte County, California, Sheriff Kory Honea confirmed that three people have died in the Bear Fire. Their identities have not yet been released. 

The remains of three victims were found in two separate locations of the same fire, Honea said, bringing the total death toll from this summer’s devastating spate of California wildfires to at least 11. 

Hornea said at least 12 people remain missing in Butte County as the Bear Fire rages on.   

Leanna Mikesler, from Clovis, California, said she had been forced to evacuate her home to escape wildfires before, but it was ’10 times harder’ during the coronavirus pandemic.

‘They call… the evacuation. And then you go from there to see if your house has been burned down,’ she said. 

Over a century of efforts by federal and state agencies to suppress naturally occurring blazes have left forests replete with dry timber and brush that provides fuel for large wildfires.

Home construction has encroached on some forests in recent decades, and owners are watching their houses burn as firefighters are unable to save property. 

Half-dozen fire experts who spoke to AP agreed that more extreme fire behavior in recent years has been driven by drought and warming temperatures they attribute to climate change. Among the most concerning developments is that fast-moving wildfires leave less time for warnings or evacuations.

Recently ‘we have seen multiple fires expand by tens of thousands of acres in a matter of hours, and 30 years or more ago that just wasn’t fire behavior that we saw,’ said Jacob Bendix, a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University who studies wildfires. 

Hotter temperatures, longer fire seasons and an estimated 140 million dead trees from a five-year drought mean that ‘fires in California are moving faster and growing larger’, said University of Utah fire expert Philip Dennison.

Mike Flannigan, who directs the Western Partnership for Wildland Fire Science at Canada’s University of Alberta, remembers the first report of a fire-created thunderstorm in 1986.

‘They were rare events, and now they’ve become commonplace,’ he said. ‘It’s because these fires are higher intensity.’

The San Francisco Bay Bridge and the city skyline are bathed in apocalyptic orange as smoke and haze blows over the city, as seen from the artificial Treasure Island 

San Francisco skyline is seen from Dolores Park in San Francisco, California on September 9. More than 300,000 acres are burning across the northwestern state including 35 major wildfires, with at least five towns ‘substantially destroyed’ and mass evacuations taking place

A view of the San Francisco Bay Bridge under an orange sky in the afternoon in San Francisco, California. The blazes across the states have made major metropolitan areas look apocalyptic 

The Bobcat fire rages above Rincon Fire Station on Highway 39 in the San Gabriel Mountains, California

A singed ice machine sits over a burned store during the Bear Fire, part of the North Lightning Complex fires, in unincorporated Butte County, California on Wednesday

Brown smoke from wildfires blowing westward in the atmosphere from California’s Sierra Nevada to the Coast Ranges and from Oregon can be seen on Wednesday

A satellite image shows wildfires near Colton, Oregon on Wednesday as the scores of wildfires continued to rage 

Interstate 5 is seen on the left as the Bear Lakes Estates neighborhood in Phoenix, Oregon, is left devastated

Homes were essentially wiped from the map as the fire took hold and laid claim to everything in its path, blown by the wind

A prime example is the so-called Creek Fire in Sierra National Forest near Yosemite National Park, which exploded through miles of drought- and beetle-killed timber, moving so fast that it trapped hundreds of campers.

‘When you have a fire run 15 miles in one day, in one afternoon, there’s no model that can predict that,’ US Forest Service forester Steve Lohr said. ‘The fires are behaving in such a way that we’ve not seen.’

Daniel Berlant, a spokesman for California’s state fire authority, said of the Creek Fire: ‘You add the winds, the dry conditions, the hot temperatures, it’s the perfect recipe. This fire is just burning at an explosive rate.’

The phenomenon isn’t restricted to California. Doug Grafe, chief of Fire Protection at the Oregon Department of Forestry, said it was unprecedented in his state for fires this week to spread from the crest of the Cascade Mountains into the valleys below, and so quickly, ‘carrying tens of miles in one period of an afternoon and not slowing down in the evening – (there is) absolutely no context for that in this environment’. 

Winds of up to 50 miles per hour sent blazes racing tens of miles within hours, burning hundreds of homes as firefighters fought at least 35 major blazes across an area of Oregon nearly twice the size of New York City. 

Parts of Medford, Oregon, a popular retirement location with over 80,000 residents in the state’s scenic Rogue Valley, were under evacuation orders or warnings as a growing wildfire closed a section of Interstate 5, the primary north-south highway in the West.

The fire moved north to Medford from Ashland, where it started on Tuesday. The blaze did little damage to Ashland, home to the historic stages of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which normally draws more than 350,000 theatergoers a year.  

The Holiday Farm fire is seen burning in the mountains around McKenzie Bridge, Oregon on September 9, 2020

Three chairs are all that remain at the Gates Post office in Gates, Oregon on Wednesday. The post office was destroyed along with several other buildings in the Santiam Canyon community as a result of the Santiam Fire

A swing and a burned-out vehicle are seen after the Bear Fire tore through Berry Creek, California

A scorched car rests in a clearing following the Bear Fire in Butte County. The blaze, part of the lightning-sparked North Complex, expanded at a critical rate of spread as winds buffeted the region

A plume rises from the Bear Fire as it burns along Lake Oroville in Butte County, California

In central California, the Creek Fire about 35 miles  north of Fresno tore through a forest killed by drought and bark beetles as military helicopters pulled campers, hikers and residents out of the area.   

On Wednesday morning, people in San Francisco and elsewhere in California woke to a deep orange sky that triggered apocalyptic visions in a year already rife with disturbing events.

Skies so dark at times that it appeared more night than day were accompanied in some places with ash falling like snow, the cause being massive wild fires filling the air with smoke and cinders.

‘The orange skies this morning are a result of wildfire smoke in the air,’ San Francisco Bay air quality officials said in a tweet.

President Barack Obama tweeted his concern over the dangers of climate change and urged voters to hit the polls

‘These smoke particles scatter blue light and only allow yellow-orange-red light to reach the surface, causing skies to look orange.’

As smoke gets thick in some areas, it blocks sunlight causing dark skies, the officials explained.

Photos of the eerie scene, particularly of a San Francisco skyline fit for a dystopian science fiction film, spread quickly on social media.

‘Is there a word for ‘the apocalypse is upon us burnt sienna?’ read one tweet fired off by someone who felt using the word ‘orange’ to describe the sky was being too kind.

Others likened the scenes to planets other than Earth.

‘If literal fire skies don’t wake us up to climate change, then nothing will,’ tweeted YouTube influencer and Zadiko tea startup chief Zack Kornfeld.

‘Enjoy joking about how crazy this year is because we made this mess and it’s only going to get worse.’   

Robert Pylant, 65, locates his fire safe in the rubble of his mobile home, early Wednesday in Gates, Oregon. All the trailers in Oak Park Trailer Park were destroyed along with the majority of the homes along East Sorbin Avenue

Hundreds of homes including entire communities were razed by wildfires in the western United States on September 9 as officials warned of potential mass deaths under apocalyptic orange skies

At least five towns were ‘substantially destroyed’ in Oregon as widespread evacuations took place across the northwestern state, governor Kate Brown said

A frightening red haze has been cast over towns in Oregon as 35 wildfires rage around the state

Several Oregon residents shared photos of red-stained skies on social media. The photo above was taken in the middle of the day in Salem  

In Southern California, fires burned in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego counties, and the forecast called for the arrival of the region’s notorious Santa Anas. The hot, dry winds could reach 50 mph at times, forecasters said.

People in a half-dozen foothill communities east of Los Angeles were being told to stay alert because of a fire in the Angeles National Forest.

‘The combination of gusty winds, very dry air, and dry vegetation will create critical fire danger,’ the National Weather Service warned.

The US Forest Service on Monday decided to close all eight national forests in the southern half of the state and shutter campgrounds statewide.

Firefighters have made headway with one blaze in the area – the El Dorado Fire – which was sparked on Saturday by a gender reveal photoshoot, when a pyrotechnical smoke device sent sparks into the bone-dry brush.

The El Dorado Fire has burned more than 12,610 acres as of Tuesday night and is 23 percent contained. 

Officials said the family behind the gender reveal debacle could face civil or criminal charges for the fire. 

The threat of winds tearing down power lines or hurling debris into them and sparking a wildfire prompted Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility, to shut off power to 172,000 customers over the weekend.   

People gather at Alamo Square under an orange and yellow overcast sky overlooking the The Painted Ladies

A view of Cupid’s Span, a sculpture by Claes Oldenburge and Coosje van Bruggen, in the foreground and the Ferry Building Clock Tower in the background under an orange overcast sky in the afternoon in San Francisco

Under darkened skies from wildfire smoke, a sailboat makes its way past the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and lights at Oracle Park Wednesday

Looking down Lombard Street, Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill at right and the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, are darkened by wildfire smoke

Smoke hangs over the San Francisco skyline on Wednesday as dozens of wildfires rage across California

California Governor Gavin Newsom on Sunday night declared a state of emergency as his hard-hit state struggled to beat back the blazes.

The Labor Day weekend heat wave fueled new fires that pushed the state to set a new record for number of acres burned with 3.1 million as of Thursday.  

The previous record was set just two years ago and included the deadliest fire in state history, the Camp Fire, which ripped through the town of Paradise and killed 85 people in November 2018.  

Cal Fire spokeswoman Lynne Tolmachoff said the new record was especially alarming because of how early in the year it was set. 

‘It’s a little unnerving because September and October are historically our worst months for fires,’ Tolmachoff told AP. ‘It’s usually hot, and the fuels really dry out. And we see more of our wind events.’ 

Compared to last year, California has seen over 2,650 more fires and a nearly 2000 percent increase in the acres burned year-to-date (January 1 – September 7), across all jurisdictions, Cal Fire said. 

The state has seen 900 wildfires since August 15, many of them started by an intense series of thousands of lightning strikes in mid-August. There have been eight fire deaths and 5,875 structures destroyed as of Thursday.   

A Butte County firefighter douses flames at the Bear Fire in Oroville, California, early Wednesday morning

Law enforcement officers watch flames into the air as the Bear Fire continues to spread in Oroville, California, on Wednesday

Similar red skies are seen in Northern California as the Creek Fire continues its path through Fresno County outside Yosemite

Smoke from California wildfires obscures the sky over Oracle Park as the Seattle Mariners take batting practice before their baseball game against the San Francisco Giants on Wednesday in San Francisco

Golfers warm up on the driving range during the preview day of the Safeway Open in Napa, California, on Wednesday

In Washington state, the town of Malden was almost entirely destroyed by a fire earlier in the week.

Whitman County Sheriff Brett Myers said that 70-80 percent of homes in the town of 300 people have gone up in flames.

Local news network KREM showed pictured of the charred Malden post office, a fire still burning inside the gutted building.  

The fire station, city hall and other buildings were also consumed, Myers said.

‘The scale of this disaster really can’t be expressed in words,’ he said. ‘The fire will be extinguished, but a community has been changed for a lifetime. I just hope we don’t find the fire took more than homes and buildings. I pray everyone got out in time.’

Larry Frick, who lives in Malden, told KXLY that he spent three hours to save his house amid the flames.

‘It’s gone, brother,’ he texted his sibling after the fire swept through. ‘The entire town is gone. Everything from here to Pine City is gone. The scariest time of my life.’ 

KREM said that at least nine wildfires were burning throughout the Inland Northwest on Monday, amid dry and windy conditions.

Washington Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz tweeted on Monday evening that, ‘Today alone, almost 300,000 acres in Washington have burned.’

‘Thousands of homes are without power. Many families have had to evacuate their homes and many homes have been lost,’ Franz wrote. ‘We’re still seeing new fire starts in every corner of the state.’

Governor Jay Inslee noted that more acres burned on Monday than in 12 of the last fire seasons in the state.  

‘We think all of these are human-caused in some dimension,’ Inslee said.

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The harsh reality of fire-prone California has caused a kind of awakening in Jackson Oaks, a wooded hillside community in Santa Clara County surrounded by dry, oak-strewn grasslands.

Warm winds blow in a steep, arid canyon almost every afternoon, a situation that has filled the residents of the 505 ranch-style homes on the east side of Morgan Hill with a premonition that was not there until the last few years California wildfires raged years.

The tales of fiery destruction and death have turned the scenic view from Jackson Oaks of Anderson Lake into an alarming panorama of fuel. Hundreds of communities across California are faced with the same situation as they seek to save their neighborhoods from the increasingly threatening forces of nature.

“We all know the danger. Every year there is a bushfire around here somewhere, ”said Jim Realini, president of the Jackson Oaks Homeowners Association. The residents “saw the news and heard the stories, and we said to everyone,” We live in one of these areas. “Everyone is much more aware this year.”

Jackson Oaks is one of 222 California churches that are doing something about it. Residents have joined Firewise, a federal program that helps neighborhoods near the wilderness – areas called the “Wildland-Urban Interface” – prepare for forest fires.

The program, which encourages residents to work together on fire safety projects, has grown steadily in California and has increased after the November campfire destroyed 14,000 homes and killed 85 people in the town of Paradise, Butte County. Over the past year, 81 California neighborhoods and parishes have joined the program, a 57% increase in one year.

“We’ve really seen tremendous growth,” said Michele Steinberg, director of the wildfire division of the Massachusetts National Fire Protection Association, which founded Firewise in 12 communities in 2002. There are now 1,500 participants across the country.

“It’s really sad that these types of disasters are required for people to take action, but I think people are finally starting to understand it and say, ‘Yeah, this is happening. I’ll do something about it, ”she said.

Firewise, managed by a consortium of forest fire organizations and federal agencies, recognizes and rewards neighborhood groups for completing a six-tier program. Members must form committees, conduct forest fire risk assessments, develop action and evacuation plans for residents, and use volunteers to clear the brush and work on other projects to thwart the fire.

The program provides annual grants to participating homeowners associations and jurisdictions that are granted by the Fire Protection Association with assistance from insurance companies. Many insurance companies give homeowners involved in Firewise a 5% discount.

Jackson Oaks joined the program four years ago, and Realini has since persuaded neighboring Holiday Lakes Estates to join, meaning residents of around 1,100 homes in the hills above Morgan Hill are now participating. He said his homeowners association, which holds two working groups a year, receives a $ 500 annual grant that he uses for fire safety work.

“Typically 20-22 people work and there are a lot of seniors,” said Marian Sacco, vice president of the homeowners association and director of the Firewise program. She said the neighborhood volunteered an average of 2,400 hours a year to weed and clean debris on empty land, including a large median along the main road.

Realini recently drove around the neighborhood to show the chopped up juniper bushes, what he called “turpentine torches,” which were piling up in the neighborhood, waiting to be dragged away. Up to 70% of homeowners have cut down the fire-prone bushes that were used as landscaping when the area was developed in the 1960s and 1970s after the firefighter declared them dangerous.

Morgan Hill is one of many places in California where fire is a constant threat. Around 5 million homes have been built nationwide along the intersection of wildlands and cities, meaning they come up against volatile open spaces and often overlook chimney-like canyons.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Safety has designated 189 communities with nearly 3 million residents as “Very High Risk Zones”. This includes large houses that cover the hills and protrude from wildland areas in the hills of the East Bay and are located in every county from Marin to Santa Clara.

Firewise is a nationwide program initiated by the National Fire Protection Association. It disseminates information on how to adapt to the threat of forest fires and encourages neighbors to work together and take action to protect homes and lives.

What is required of a Firewise community?

A Firewise location must have eight to 2,500 single-family homes. Residents must form a board or committee and work with the local fire department or the California Department of Forestry and Fire Safety to prepare a forest fire risk assessment.

Each location must document the equivalent of one volunteer hour per residential unit for measures to reduce the risk of forest fire. This means that in a community with 100 homes, residents have to volunteer 100 hours a year.

How does a neighborhood apply?

Applications can be submitted online at portal.firewise.org.

See morecollapse

At least 5,000 homes in the hills of Lafayette and Walnut Creek are in “priority areas,” the fire department said. At least 5,000 more cover fire endangered ridges and slopes in the Oakland and Berkeley hills.

In many cities and counties, strict state fire protection regulations apply in high-risk zones. These include restrictions on building materials and fire retardant landscaping requirements. Street widths of at least 22 feet, which allow fire engines to maneuver as residents flee, have become common in new hillside neighborhoods.

Cal Fire has done everything to improve the situation and requires 100 feet of “defensible space” – essentially fire protection – around homes, but the rule can be difficult to enforce.

The Firewise program, which includes state and local regulations as well as best practices from fire safety experts, is growing in popularity everywhere but has made great strides in Marin County, where thousands of homes are nestled in the hills and canyons adjacent to Mount Tamalpais.

Fire scientists have long classified Marin, with its narrow, winding roads and wooded hilly landscapes, as the next possible candidate for a catastrophic fire. These include forested land in and around Mill Valley, believed by many to be the most dangerous place in Marin, and 251 square kilometers of unregulated wooded and oak-strewn land – more than five times the size of San Francisco.

Todd Lando, executive coordinator of FireSafe Marin, a nonprofit that helps homeowners reduce the risk of fire, said Marin County has 43 approved Firewise neighborhoods, including a dozen in Mill Valley. That’s more than any other county in the state, he said.

Marin County hasn’t had a major wildfire since the fall of 1995 when a smoldering campfire, lit by some students, spiraled out of control on Mount Vision in the Point Reyes National Seashore, blackened 12,000 acres and destroyed 45 homes.

Still, Lando said, there is good reason to be concerned. A huge fire burned over Mount Tamalpais in the Mill Valley in 1929, and an even bigger fire struck in September 1923, scorching 50,000 acres from Novato to Bolinas. This fire was bigger than the Tubbs Fire that raged in Napa and Sonoma counties in 2017, killing 22 people and destroying thousands of homes in Santa Rosa.

“If that fire started today, we would be looking at 5,000 to 8,000 houses burning,” Lando said. “It’s been nearly 100 years of vegetation growth, with very few fires since then. That story of fires is a story that repeats itself. So we have every reason to believe that fire can happen today. “

Another area with intense focus is in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where the number of houses built in areas with high fire risk has been growing steadily for decades.

Kristen Cook, who heads the Firewise Council at You Bet, a former gold rush town in Nevada County, said the program grew from zero to 600 participants after handing out flyers in February reading, “Are you ready for wildfire? You bet. “

The main concern in the wooded community is the narrow 9 mile long road that winds through the forest and is the only way in and out. Cook is working with residents to ensure they have “bags” of clothing, water, radios, tools, and medical kits ready, and to park their cars outside with at least half a tank of fuel.

“In the past, a red flag day meant it was hot, so let’s go to the river,” Cook said. “The campfire created awareness of what a red flag warning really means.”

Back in Jackson Oaks, Realini stopped his car on a cliff overlooking the vast gold-colored canyon and distant reservoir and pointed north, which is officially known to be the greatest risk of fire. He was on a winding mountain road, one of two roads in and out of Jackson Oaks. A recent fire safety study estimated that if everyone were to leave at the same time, it would take residents 2½ hours to get out.

“In the afternoon, from around 3pm to 6pm, we get a north wind, and that’s where most of the fires come,” Realini said, taking in the view. “We all know the danger now and we still have a lot to do.”

Peter Fimrite is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite

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