fires
Pristine Lake Tahoe shrouded in smoke from threatening fire
Ash rained down on Lake Tahoe on Tuesday and thick yellow smoke blotted out views of the mountains rimming its pristine blue waters as a massive wildfire threatened the alpine vacation spot on the California-Nevada state line.
Tourists ducked into cafes, outdoor gear shops and casinos on Lake Tahoe Boulevard for a respite from hazardous air coming from an erratic blaze less than 20 miles (32 kilometers) away.
Read:Winds threaten to fan destructive California wildfire
The Caldor Fire erupted over the course of a week into the nation’s No. 1 firefighting priority and was “knocking on the door” of Tahoe, said Thom Porter, California’s state fire chief. A major wildfire has not penetrated the Lake Tahoe Basin since 2007.
Tourists typically come to swim and hike, relax along the lake’s calm shores or take their chances gambling, not risk their lives in the face of a potential disaster.
Although there were no evacuations ordered and Porter said he didn’t think the fire would reach the lake, it was impossible to ignore the blanket of haze so thick and vast that it closed schools for a second day in Reno, Nevada, which is about 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the fire.
Visitors wore masks outdoors — not because the coronavirus pandemic, but because of the toxic air and inescapable stench of fire. The gondola that ferries summer passengers to the summit of the Heavenly Mountain ski area was closed until winter due to the wildfire risk.
Cindy Osterloh, whose husband pushed a relative in a wheelchair beneath the idled cables, said she and family members visiting from San Diego were all on allergy medications to take the sting out of their eyes and keep their noses from running so they can ride out the smoke for the rest of their vacation.
“We got up and it was a lot clearer this morning. We went for a walk and then we came back and now it’s coming in again,” she said of the smoke. “We’re going to go and see a movie and hopefully it clears up enough that we can go do our boat rides.”
Read:California wildfires destroy homes; winds hamper containment
An army of firefighters worked to contain the blaze, which has spread explosively in a manner witnessed in the past two years during extreme drought. Climate change has made the West warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more destructive, according to scientists.
Massive plumes have erupted in flames, burning embers carried by gusts have skipped miles ahead of fire lines, and fires that typically die down at night have made long runs in the dark.
Northern California has seen a series of disastrous blazes that have burned hundreds of homes and many remain uncontained. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden declared that a major disaster exists in California and ordered federal aid made available in four northern counties ravaged by blazes dating back to July 14.
The Caldor Fire had scorched more than 190 square miles (492 square kilometers) and destroyed at least 455 homes since Aug. 14 in the Sierra Nevada southwest of Lake Tahoe. It was 11% contained and threatened more than 17,000 structures.
Nationally, 92 large fires were burning in a dozen states, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Although many fires are larger, the Caldor Fire has become the top priority to keep it from sweeping into the Tahoe.
As the fire grew last week, politicians, environmentalists, and policy makers gathered on the shore for the 25th annual Lake Tahoe Summit dedicated to protecting the lake and the pine-covered mountains that surround it.
Read:Fueled by winds, largest wildfire moves near California city
With the Caldor Fire burning to the southwest and the Dixie Fire, the second-largest in state history with a 500-mile (804-kilometer) perimeter, burning about 65 miles (104 kilometers) to the north, the risk to the lake was top of mind.
“The fires that are raging all around us nearby are screaming this warning: Tahoe could be next,” said Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif.
The last major blaze in the area took South Lake Tahoe by surprise after blowing up from an illegal campfire in the summer of 2007. The Angora Fire burned less than 5 square miles (13 square kilometers) but destroyed 254 homes, injured three people and forced 2,000 people to flee.
Scars from the fire can still be seen not far from the commercial strip where South Lake Tahoe meets the Nevada border in Stateline, where tourists go to gamble.
Inside the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, cocktail waitresses in fishnet stockings and leopard-print corsets served customers playing slots and blackjack who said they weren’t overly concerned about the fire.
Sitting at a slot machine near a window looking out at cars driving through the haze on Lake Tahoe Boulevard, Ramona Trejo said she and her husband would stay for their 50th wedding anniversary, as planned.
Trejo, who uses supplemental oxygen due to respiratory problems, said her husband wanted to keep gambling.
“I would want to go now,” she said.
Fire breaks out at Banani building; 2 girls dead
Two girls were burned to death and a woman was injured seriously when a fire broke out at a building in the city's Banani area early Monday.
The deceased were identified as Mim, 16, and Swapna, 14.
Read:Probe committee formed over Chairman Bari fire
Mohammad Raihanul, station officer of Fire Service and Civil Defence headquarters, said the fire broke out around 1:56 am on the 3rd floor of the 10-storey building and spread around soon.
On information, four firefighting units rushed to the spot and extinguished the blaze around 2:40 am.
The fire service men rescued three people from the building and took them to Dhaka Metropolitan Hospital where doctors declared Mim and Swapna dead, said Noor-E-Azam Mia, officer-in-charge of Banani Police Station.
Read:Banani warehouse fire doused after 10 hrs
Another woman, Rinta, 30, suffered serious burn injuries, and is undergoing treatment at the hospital.
However, it is still not clear what caused the fire, said police.
Probe committee formed over Chairman Bari fire
A four-member probe committee has been formed Sunday over the large fire in Chairman Bari yesterday that took 10 hours to put out.
DAD of Fire Service and Civil Defence Shahjahan Sikder at the headquarters said that the committee has been directed to submit the investigation report within seven working days.
Read:Banani warehouse fire doused after 10 hrs
Deputy Director (Development) Noor Hasan Ahmed was made president and Deputy Assistant Director Niaz Ahmed as secretary of the committee. Two other members of the committee include senior station officer of Tejgaon Fire Station and warehouse inspector of the concerned area.
On Saturday morning a massive fire broke out at a six-storey building in Banai’s Chairman Bari area. Eleven units of fire service, later three units from the Bangladesh Army and the Navy joined together and managed to put out the fire after 10 hours of effort.
Read: Fire breaks out at a bakery in city’s Nawabpur
Fortunately, no casualties were reported.
California wildfires destroy homes; winds hamper containment
Dry and windy weather dogged firefighters’ efforts to contain destructive fires that are devouring the bone-dry forests of drought-stricken Northern California on Thursday.
An estimated 11,000 firefighters were on the lines of more than a dozen large wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of homes and other buildings, forced thousands of people to flee communities and filled skies with smoke.
The U.S. Forest Service announced that it will close nine national forests in the region beginning on Aug. 22 and running through Sept. 6 because of extreme fire conditions and because firefighting resources have been stretched thin by the sheer number of blazes burning around the country.
The monstrous Dixie Fire, burning since July 13 in the northern Sierra Nevada and southern Cascades, ballooned further to about 1,060 square miles (2,745 square kilometers) and was only 35% contained, authorities said.
Read:Fueled by winds, largest wildfire moves near California city
The fire, which gutted the town of Greenville two weeks ago, has destroyed more than 1,200 buildings including 649 homes, according to ongoing damage assessments.
About 100 miles (161 kilometers) to the south, there was still no official count of the number of homes destroyed when winds whipped the Caldor Fire into an inferno that roared through the Sierra town of Grizzly Flats this week. Those who viewed the aftermath saw few homes still standing in the community of 1,200 residents.
Fire managers were rushing resources to the fire growing on steep slopes in a forested region southwest of Lake Tahoe. More than 650 firefighters and 13 helicopters were assigned to the blaze, and air tankers from throughout the state were flying fire suppression missions there as conditions allowed, authorities said.
“The hope is with the additional resources and personnel on scene, we can really start to build that box around this fire and start the containment,” said Keith Wade of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Evacuees from the Caldor Fire found refuge in places like the Green Valley Community Church in Placerville, west of the fire, where they set up tents and trailers in a parking lot. Adrian Childress, 7, painted pictures to pass the time and a special tent was set up for people who wished to pray.
Read:Thunderstorms, heat fuel wildfires burning across West
In Omo Ranch, close to where the fire started, a bulldozer ripped out trees to build a fire line and stop the blaze from spreading south.
While nearly the entire town evacuated, Thurman Conroy and his wife, Michele, stayed behind to protect their house and their business, Conroy General Store. But they were prepared to flee if the fire gets too close.
“The fire wants us bad because it’s made every attempt it can to get out of that canyon and up this way,” Thurman said. “So they keep beating it down. And it’s just ... it’s resilient, it’s stubborn, it won’t go away. That’s all we can do.”
California’s fires were among 104 large, active blazes Thursday in 12 states, mostly in the West, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Those fires combined have scorched nearly 4,000 square miles (10,360 square kilometers).
Climate change has made the West warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more destructive, according to scientists.
Read:Climate-fueled wildfires take toll on tropical Pacific isles
Drought, heat, low humidity and winds have left California vegetation ready to burn this summer. More than two-dozen new fires erupted Wednesday alone. All but two were quickly contained.
One small but destructive blaze burned through a mobile home park and reduced an estimated 50 homes to ashes in Lake County, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) north of San Francisco. Elsewhere in the northwestern region of the state, two big fires continued to burn in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest.
Meanwhile, Pacific Gas & Electric said Thursday that it had restored power to nearly 50,000 Northern California customers whose power was shut off Tuesday to prevent new fires from being ignited if electrical lines were damaged during high winds. The utility said it found at least 10 instances of weather-related damage, including four that potentially could have caused fires if the utility hadn’t de-energized power lines.
Fires harming California’s efforts to curb climate change
Record-setting blazes raging across Northern California are wiping out forests central to plans to reduce carbon emissions and testing projects designed to protect communities, the state’s top fire official said Wednesday, hours before a fast-moving new blaze erupted.
Fires that are “exceedingly resistant to control” in drought-sapped vegetation are on pace to exceed the amount of land burned last year — the most in modern history — and having broader effects, said Thom Porter, chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Hours after Porter spoke, a grass fire spurred by winds up to 30 mph (48 kilometers per hour) swiftly burned dozens of homes, forced the evacuation of schools and threatened the city of Clearlake about 80 miles north of San Francisco.
Rows of homes were destroyed on at least two blocks and television footage showed crews dousing burning homes with water. Children were rushed out of an elementary school as a field across the street burned.
Read: Fueled by winds, largest wildfire moves near California city
Lake County Sheriff Brian Martin issued a warning of “immediate threat to life and property.”
“This isn’t the fire to mess around with,” he told KGO-TV.
Fires burning mostly in the northern part of the state threatened thousands of homes and led to extended evacuation orders and warnings, as well as power outages to prevent utility equipment from sparking fires amid strong winds.
The largest current fire in the West, known as the Dixie Fire, is the first to have burned from east to west across the spine of California, where the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountains meet, the state’s fire chief said.
It was also one of several massive fires that have destroyed areas of the timber belt that serve as a centerpiece of the state’s climate reduction plan because trees can store carbon dioxide.
“We are seeing generational destruction of forests because of what these fires are doing,” Porter said. “This is going to take a long time to come back from.”
Although the Dixie Fire is only a third contained and remains a threat, dozens of fire engines and crews were transferred Wednesday to fight the Caldor Fire, which exploded in size southwest of Lake Tahoe and ravaged Grizzly Flats, a community of about 1,200. It covered 84 square miles (217 square kilometers).
Dozens of homes burned, according to officials, but tallies were incomplete. Those who viewed the aftermath saw few homes standing. Lone chimneys rose from the ashes, little more than rows of chairs remained of a church and the burned out husks of cars littered the landscape.
Chris Sheean said the dream home he bought six weeks ago near the elementary school went up in smoke. He felt lucky he and his wife, cats and dog got out safely hours before the flames arrived.
“It’s devastation. You know, there’s really no way to explain the feeling, the loss,” Sheean said. “Maybe next to losing a child, a baby, maybe. … Everything that we owned, everything that we’ve built is gone.”
Read:Wildfires in Algeria leave 42 dead, including 25 soldiers
All 7,000 residents in nearby Pollock Pines were ordered to evacuate Tuesday. A large fire menaced the town in 2014.
Time lapse video from a U.S. Forest Service webcam captured the fire’s extreme behavior as it grew beneath a massive gray cloud. A ceiling of dark smoke spread out from the main plume that began to glow and was then illuminated by flames shooting hundreds of feet in the sky.
John Battles, a professor of forest ecology at the University of California, Berkeley, said the fires are behaving in ways not seen in the past as flames churn through trees and brush desiccated by a megadrought in the West and exacerbated by climate change.
“These are reburning areas that have burned what we thought were big fires 10 years ago,” Battles said. “They’re reburning that landscape.”
The wildfires, in large part, have been fueled by high temperatures, strong winds and dry weather. Climate change has made the U.S. West warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more destructive, according to scientists.
Battles said the fires have created a vicious cycle. Burning increases carbon emissions while also destroying trees and other ground cover that can absorb the greenhouse gas. Dead trees will continue to release carbon they once stored.
The fire is burning along the U.S. Route 50 corridor, one of two highways between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. The highway through the canyon along the South Fork of the American River has been the focus of a decades-long effort to protect homes by preventing the spread of fires through a combination of fuel breaks, prescribed burns and logging.
“All of that is being tested as we speak,” Porter said. “When fire is jumping outside of its perimeter, sometimes miles ... those fuel projects won’t stop a fire. Sometimes they’re just used to slow it enough to get people out of the way.”
In the Sierra-Cascades region about 100 miles (161 kilometers) to the north, the month-old Dixie Fire expanded by thousands of acres to 993 square miles (2,572 square kilometers) — two weeks after the blaze gutted the Gold Rush-era town of Greenville. About 16,000 homes and buildings were threatened by the Dixie Fire, the second-largest in state history.
Read: Wildfires rampage in Greek forests, cut large island in half
“It’s a pretty good size monster,” Mark Brunton, a firefighting operations section chief, said in a briefing. “It’s going to be a work in progress — eating the elephant one bite at a time kind of thing.”
The Caldor and Dixie fires are among a dozen large wildfires in the northern half of California.
More than 40,000 Pacific Gas & Electric customers had no power, though the utility began restoring electricity to customers as forecasts for low humidity and gusts were expected to improve Thursday.
Most of the fires this year have hit the northern part of the state, largely sparing Southern California, which experienced rare drizzle and light rain Wednesday. Fire conditions in the region are expected to get worse in the fall.
Fueled by winds, largest wildfire moves near California city
A wildfire raged through a small Northern California forest town Tuesday, burning dozens of homes as dangerously dry and windy weather also continued to fuel other massive blazes and prompted the nation’s largest utility to begin shutting off power to 51,000 customers.
The Caldor fire in the northern Sierra Nevada had burned an estimated 50 homes in and around Grizzly Flats, a town of about 1,200 people, fire officials said at a community meeting.
Gov. Gavin Newsom proclaimed a state of emergency for El Dorado County because of the blaze, which tripled in size between Monday and Tuesday afternoon to nearly 50 square miles (129 square kilometers),
To the north the Dixie Fire — the largest of some 100 active wildfires in more than a dozen Western states — was advancing toward Susanville, population about 18,000.
Read:Thunderstorms, heat fuel wildfires burning across West
Meanwhile, Pacific Gas & Electric announced it had begun shutting off power to some 51,000 customers in small portions of 18 northern counties to prevent winds from knocking down or fouling power lines and sparking new blazes.
The utility said the precautionary shutoffs were focused in the Sierra Nevada foothills, the North Coast, the North Valley and the North Bay mountains and could last into Wednesday afternoon.
Very few homes were left standing in Grizzly Flats, where streets were littered with downed power lines and poles. Houses were reduced to smoldering ash and twisted metal with only chimneys rising above the ruins. A post office and elementary school were also destroyed.
Two people with serious or severe injuries were airlifted to hospitals from the Grizzly Flats area, fire officials said.
Derek Shaves and Tracy Jackson were helping their friend salvage food and other supplies from the Grizzly Pub & Grub, a business in the evacuation zone that wasn’t touched by the blaze.
Shaves said he visited Grizzly Flats Tuesday and saw his home and most of the houses in his neighborhood had been destroyed by the fire.
“It’s a pile of ash,” he said. “Everybody on my block is a pile of ash and every block that I visited — but for five separate homes that were safe — was totally devastated.”
At the Dixie Fire, numerous resources were put into the Susanville area, where residents were warned to be ready to evacuate, said Mark Brunton, an operations section chief.
“It’s not out of play, and the next 24 hours are going to be crucial to watch as to what the fire is going to do there,” he told an online briefing.
Read: Climate-fueled wildfires take toll on tropical Pacific isles
To the east, spot fires became established south of the small community of Janesville, which had been ordered evacuated. Some structures were lost there — images captured by The Associated Press showed a home consumed by flames — but a surge of firefighters was able to herd the fire around the majority of the town, Brunton said.
The Dixie Fire, which had burned some 600 homes, is the largest of the major wildfires burning in Western U.S. states that have seen historic drought and weeks of high temperatures and dry weather that have left trees, brush and grasslands as flammable as tinder. Climate change has made the U.S. West warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more destructive, according to scientists.
Susanville is the seat of Lassen County and the largest city that the Dixie Fire, named for the road where it started, has approached since it broke out last month. The former Sierra Nevada logging and mining town has two state prisons, a nearby federal lockup and a casino.
Ash fell from the advancing fire, and a police statement urged residents “to be alert and be ready to evacuate” if the fire threatens the city.
The Dixie Fire has scorched more than 940 square miles (2,434 square kilometers) in the northern Sierra Nevada and southern Cascades since it ignited on July 13 and eventually merged with a smaller blaze. It’s less than a third contained.
Investigations are continuing, but PG&E has notified utility regulators that the Dixie and Fly fires may have been caused by trees falling into its power lines. The Dixie Fire began near the town of Paradise, which was devastated by a 2018 wildfire ignited by PG&E equipment during strong winds. Eighty-five people died.
Ongoing damage surveys have counted more than 1,100 buildings destroyed, including 630 homes, and more than 16,000 structures remained threatened. Numerous evacuation orders were in effect.
Near the Caldor Fire, people were offering assistance to evacuees, including the four-footed kind. Susan Collins of Placerville used her horse trailer to help move two horses Tuesday after offering help on an El Dorado County Facebook page.
“I know not everybody is prepared when something like this happens, and my purpose in life is to be there to help people,” she said.
Read: Wildfires in Algeria leave 42 dead, including 25 soldiers
Across the state line in Nevada, school administrators delayed start times in the Reno-Sparks because of a cloak of wildfire smoke from the Dixie Fire blanketing the region. Smoke plumes from the Caldor Fire were also visible from northern Nevada.
Two dozen fires were burning in Montana and nearly 50 more in Idaho, Washington and Oregon, according to the National Fire Interagency Center.
In Montana, authorities ordered evacuations on Tuesday for several remote communities in north- central Montana as strong winds propelled a large wildfire toward inhabited areas.
The mandatory evacuation covered Lodge Pole, a town of about 300 people on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, and the former mining town of Zortman, which has about two dozen people, KOJM reported.
Thunderstorms, heat fuel wildfires burning across West
Johnnie Brookwood had never heard of a road named Dixie when a wildfire began a month ago in the forestlands of Northern California.
Within three weeks, it exploded into the largest wildfire burning in the U.S., destroying more than 1,000 homes and businesses including a lodge in the gold rush-era town of Greenville where she was renting a room for $650 per month.
“At first (the fire) didn’t affect us at all, it was off in some place called Dixie, I didn’t even know what it means,” Brookwood, 76, said Saturday. “Then it was ‘Oh no we have to go too?’ Surely Greenville won’t burn, but then it did and now all we can see are ashes.”
Read:Climate-fueled wildfires take toll on tropical Pacific isles
Firefighters faced “another critical day” as thunderstorms pushed flames closer to two towns not far from where the Dixie Fire destroyed much of Greenville last week.
The thunderstorms, which began Friday, didn’t produce much rain but whipped up wind and created lightning strikes, forcing crews to focus on using bulldozers to build lines and keep the blaze from reaching Westwood, a town of about 1,700 people. Westwood was placed under evacuation orders Aug. 5.
Wind gusts of up to 50 mph (80 kph) also pushed the fire closer to Janesville, a town of about 1,500 people, east of Greenville, said Jake Cagle, the operations chief at the east zone of the fire.
“Very tough day in there yesterday in the afternoon and the night (crew) picked up the pieces and tried to secure the edge the best they could with the resources they had,” he said in a briefing Saturday.
With a similar forecast of thunderstorms Saturday, firefighters faced “another critical day, another challenging day,” Cagle said.
The fire was among more than 100 large wildfires burning in more than a dozen states in the West seared by drought and hot, bone-dry weather that turned forests, brushlands, meadows and pastures into tinder.
The U.S. Forest Service said Friday it’s operating in crisis mode, fully deploying firefighters and maxing out its support system.
The roughly 21,000 federal firefighters working on the ground is more than double the number of firefighters sent to contain forest fires at this time a year ago, said Anthony Scardina, a deputy forester for the agency’s Pacific Southwest region.
More than 6,000 firefighters alone were battling the Dixie Fire, which has ravaged nearly 845 square miles (2,100 square kilometers) — an area the size of Tokyo — and was 31% contained.
“The size is unimaginable, its duration and its impact on these people, all of us, including me, is unbelieve,” Brookwood said while staying in her third evacuation center.
Read:Wildfire bears down on Montana towns as West burns
The cause of the fire has not been determined. Pacific Gas and Electric has said the fire may have been started when a tree fell on its power line.
There also was a danger of new fires erupting because of unstable weather conditions, including extreme heat across the northern half of the West and a chance of thunderstorms that could bring lightning to Northern California, Oregon and Nevada, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
A fast-moving fire broke out Saturday afternoon east of Salt Lake City, shutting down Interstate 80 and prompting the evacuation of Summit Park, a mountain community of 6,600 people. Fire officials said the blaze was burning about 3 square miles (8 square kilometers) and threatening thousands of homes and power lines.
In southeastern Montana, firefighters were gaining ground on a pair of fires that chewed through vast rangelands and at one point threatened the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation.
The fires were caused by heat from coal seams, the deposits of coal found in the ground in the area, said Peggy Miller, a spokeswoman for the fires.
Mandatory evacuation for the tribal headquarters town of Lame Deer remained in place due to poor air quality, she added.
Smoke also drove air pollution levels to unhealthy or very unhealthy levels in parts of Northern California, Oregon and Idaho, according to the U.S. Air Quality Index.
Hot, dry weather with strong afternoon winds also propelled several fires in Washington state, and similar weather was expected into the weekend, fire officials said.
In southeastern Oregon, two new wildfires started by lightning Thursday near the California border spread rapidly through juniper trees, sagebrush and evergreen trees.
The Patton Meadow Fire about 14 miles (23 kilometers) west of Lakeview, near the California border, exploded to 11 square miles (28 square kilometers) in less than 24 hours in a landscape sucked dry by extreme drought. It was 10% contained.
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Triple-digit temperatures and bone-dry conditions in Oregon could increase fire risks through the weekend.
Climate change has made the U.S. West warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more destructive, according to scientists.
Dozens of fires also are burning in western Canada and in Europe, including Greece, where a massive wildfire has decimated forests and torched homes.
Climate-fueled wildfires take toll on tropical Pacific isles
A metal roof sits atop the burned remains of a homestead on the once-lush slopes of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea — a dormant volcano and the state’s tallest peak — charred cars and motorcycles strewn about as wind-whipped sand and ash blast the scorched landscape.
Generations of Kumu Micah Kamohoalii’s family have lived on these lands reserved for Native Hawaiians, and his cousin owns this house destroyed by the state’s largest-ever wildfire.
“I’ve never seen a fire this big,” Kamohoalii said. “Waimea has had fires, many of them before and some maybe a few hundred acres, but not this size.”
The fire has burned more than 70 square miles (181 square kilometers) in the two weeks it has been going. But it wasn’t the first time this area has burned, and won’t be the last. Like many islands in the Pacific, Hawaii’s dry seasons are getting more extreme with climate change.
Read:Wildfire bears down on Montana towns as West burns
“Everyone knows Waimea to be the pasturelands and to be all the green rolling hills. And so when I was young, all of this was always green,” Kamohoalii said. “In the last 10 to 15 years, it has been really, really dry.”
Huge wildfires highlight the dangers of climate change-related heat and drought for many communities throughout the U.S. West and other hotspots around the world. But experts say relatively small fires on typically wet, tropical islands in the Pacific are also on the rise, creating a cycle of ecological damage that affects vital and limited resources for millions of residents.
From Micronesia to Hawaii, wildfires have been a growing problem for decades. With scarce funding to prevent and suppress these fires, island communities have struggled to address the problem.
“On tropical islands, fires have a unique set of impacts,” said Clay Trauernicht, an ecosystems and wildfire researcher at the University of Hawaii. “First and foremost, fires were very rare prior to human arrival on any Pacific island. The vegetation, the native ecosystems, really evolved in the absence of frequent fires. And so when you do get these fires, they tend to kind of wreak havoc.”
But it’s not just burnt land that is affected. Fires on islands harm environments from the top of mountains to below the ocean’s surface.
“Once a fire occurs, what you’re doing is removing vegetation,” Trauernicht said. “And we often get heavy rainfall events. All of that exposed soil gets carried downstream and we have these direct impacts of erosion, sedimentation on our marine ecosystems. So it really hammers our coral reefs as well.”
Pacific island reefs support local food production, create barriers to large storm surges and are a critical part of tourism that keeps many islands running.
The wet season on tropical islands also causes fire-adapted grasses to grow tall and thick, building fuel for the next summer’s wildfires.
“Guinea grass grows six inches a day in optimal conditions and a six-foot tall patch of grass can throw 20-foot flame lengths,” said Michael Walker, Hawaii’s state fire protection forester. “So what we have here are really fast-moving, very hot, very dangerous fires.”
Read: Wildfires in Algeria leave 42 dead, including 25 soldiers
Walker said such non-native grasses that have proliferated in Hawaii are adapted to fire, but native species and shrubs are not.
“While (these wildfires) may not compare to the size and duration of what folks have in the western United States, we burn a significant portion of our lands every year because of these grass fires, and they’re altering our natural ecosystems and converting forests to grass,” he said.
The latest wildfire on Hawaii’s Big Island burned about 1% of the state’s total land, and other islands in the Pacific such as Palau, Saipan and Guam burn even more — up to 10% in severe fire years.
On average, Guam has nearly 700 wildfires a year, Palau about 175 and Saipan about 20, according to data from 2018.
Guam, like many other places, has long used fire as a tool. Farmers sometimes use it to clear fields and hunters have been known to burn areas while poaching.
The U.S. territory’s forestry chief Christine Camacho Fejeran said fires on the island are mostly caused by arson. “So all of Guam’s wildfires are human-caused issues, whether it’s an intentional or an escaped backyard fire or another (cause),” she said.
On average, Fejeran said, 6,000 to 7,000 acres (2,430 to 2,830 hectares) of the island burns each year, amounting to about 5% of its land.
While no homes have been lost to recent wildfires on Guam, Fejeran believes that trend will come to an end — unless more is done to combat the fires.
The island has made some changes in fire legislation, management, education and enforcement. Arson has become a chargeable offense, but Fejeran says enforcement remains an obstacle in the tight-knit community.
Read: 'We fought a great battle': Greece defends wildfire response
Back in Hawaii, last week’s blaze destroyed three homes, but the fire threatened many more.
Mikiala Brand, who has lived for two decades on a 50-acre homestead, watched as flames came within a few hundred yards (meters) of her house.
As the fire grew closer, she saw firefighters, neighbors and the National Guard racing into her rural neighborhood to fight it. She had to evacuate her beloved home twice in less than 24 hours.
“Of course it was scary,” she said. “But I had faith that the strong, the brave and the talented, and along with nature and Akua, which is our name for the universal spirit, would take care.”
Demonstrating the tenacity of many Native Hawaiians in her farming and ranching community, Brand said, “I only worry about what I have control over.”
Down the mountain in Waikoloa Village, a community of about 7,000, Linda Hunt was also forced to evacuate. She works at a horse stable and scrambled to save the animals as flames whipped closer.
“We only have one and a half roads to get out — you have the main road and then you have the emergency access,” Hunt said of a narrow dirt road. “Everybody was trying to evacuate, there was a lot of confusion.”
The fire was eventually put out just short of the densely populated neighborhood, but had flames reached the homes, it could have been disastrous on the parched landscape.
“When you have high winds like we get here, it’s difficult no matter how big your fire break is, it’s going to blow right through,” Hunt said.
Read: Wildfires rampage in Greek forests, cut large island in half
While fires are becoming more difficult to fight because of dry and hot conditions associated with climate change, experts say the Pacific islands still can help prevent these blazes from causing ecological damage and property losses.
“Fire presents a pretty interesting component of kind of all these climate change impacts that we’re dealing with in the sense that they are manageable,” said Trauernicht, the University of Hawaii wildfire expert.
In addition to education and arson prevention, he said, land use — such as grazing practices and reforestation that reduce volatile grasses — could help.
“It’s within our control, potentially, to reduce the impacts that we’re seeing with fires,” Trauernicht said. “Both in terms of forest loss as well as the impacts on coral reefs.”
Wildfire bears down on Montana towns as West burns
A wildfire bore down on rural southeastern Montana towns Thursday as continuing hot, dry weather throughout the West drove flames through more than a dozen states.
Several thousand people remained under evacuation orders as the Richard Spring Fire advanced across the sparsely-populated Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation.
Meanwhile, the Dixie Fire — which started July 13 and is the largest wildfire burning in the nation — threatened a dozen small communities in the northern Sierra Nevada even though its southern end was mostly corralled by fire lines.
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The blaze had burned over 780 square miles (over 2,000 square kilometers), destroyed some 550 homes and nearly obliterated the town of Greenville. It was 30% contained.
On Wednesday, the Montana fire displayed extreme behavior and had grown by tens of thousands of acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The blaze, which was only 15% surrounded, began Sunday and powerful gusts caused it to explode across more than 230 square miles (600 square kilometers).
By nightfall, the fire had crept within about 2 miles (3.22 kilometers) of the evacuated town of Lame Deer, leaping over a highway where officials had hoped to stop it.
Rancher Jimmy Peppers sat on his horse east of town, watching an orange glow grow near the site of his house.
“I didn’t think it would cross the highway so I didn’t even move my farm equipment,” said Peppers, who spent the afternoon herding his cattle onto a neighbor’s pasture closer to town. “I don’t know if I’ll have a house in the morning.”
The town of about 2,000 people is home to the tribal headquarters and several subdivisions and is surrounded by rugged, forested terrain. By late Wednesday a second fire was closing in on Lame Deer from the west, while the Richard Spring fire raged to the east.
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A few miles from town, Krystal Two Bulls and some friends stuck around to clear brush from her yard in hopes of protecting it from the flames. Thick plumes of smoke rose from behind a tree-covered ridgeline just above the house.
“We’re packed and we’re loaded so if we have to go, we will,” Two Bull said. “I’m not fearful; I’m prepared. Here you don’t just run from fire or abandon your house.”
Also ordered to leave were about 600 people in and around Ashland, a small town just outside the reservation. Local, state and federal firefighters were joined by ranchers using their own heavy equipment to carve out fire lines around houses.
The National Weather Service said a ridge of high pressure moving into the area would pump temperatures into the 90s over the weekend.
Drought conditions have left trees, grass and brush bone-dry throughout many Western states, leaving them ripe for ignition. Montana alone had 25 large wildfires burning, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
At the same time, California and some other states were facing flows of monsoonal moisture that were too high to bring real rain but could create thunderstorms bringing new fire risks from dry lightning and erratic winds.
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In Northern California, a number of wildfires and the threat of more prompted three national forests to close down the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area, a half-million-acre area of granite peaks, lakes and trails, into November.
“Tracking hikers in unsafe areas pulls much-needed aircraft away from firefighting efforts, and adds risk and exposure to first responders. Additionally, forest managers hope to limit the possibility of human-caused fires with this temporary full closure,” said a forest statement.
Scientists have said climate change has made the region much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. The more than 100 large wildfires in the American West come as parts of Europe are also burning.
Nearly 900 buildings destroyed by massive California fire
California’s largest single wildfire in recorded history kept pushing through forestlands on Tuesday as fire crews tried to protect rural communities from flames that have destroyed hundreds of homes.
Clear skies over parts of the month-old Dixie Fire have allowed aircraft to rejoin nearly 6,000 firefighters in the attack this week.
“Whether or not we can fly depends very much on where the smoke is. There’s still some areas where it’s just too smoky,” fire spokesman Edwin Zuniga said.
Heavy smoke reduced visibility on the fire’s west end while the east end saw renewed action as afternoon winds took hold, fire officials said.
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Burning through bone-dry trees, brush and grass, the fire by Tuesday had destroyed more than 1,000 buildings, including nearly 550 homes. Much of the small community of Greenville was incinerated during an explosive run of flames last week.
But the reports are “definitely subject to change” because assessment teams still can’t get into many areas to count what burned, Zuniga said.
The Dixie Fire, named for the road where it started, also threatened 14,000 buildings in more than a dozen small mountain and rural communities in the northern Sierra Nevada.
Crews have cut thousands of acres of new fire lines aimed at preventing the fire from spreading. Officials believe the fire lines created on the blaze’s southern side will hold the fire at bay there, but the fire’s future is unknown, authorities said.
“We don’t know where this fire is going to end and where it’s going to land. It continues to challenge us,” said Chris Carlton, supervisor for Plumas National Forest.
Temperatures are expected to rise and the humidity is expected to fall over the next few days, with triple-digit high temperatures possible later in the week along with a return of strong afternoon winds, fire meteorologist Rich Thompson warned Monday evening.
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The fire that broke out July 14 grew slightly on Tuesday to an area of 766 square miles (1,984 square kilometers) but containment increased to 27%, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The Dixie Fire is about half the size of the August Complex, a series of lightning-caused 2020 fires across seven counties that were fought together and that state officials consider California’s largest wildfire overall.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday declared a state of emergency for northern Shasta, Trinity and Tehama counties. The declaration frees up state resources to help fight fires in those counties and give assistance to residents affected by he blazes.
California’s raging wildfires are among some 100 large blazes burning across 15 states, mostly in the West, where historic drought conditions have left lands parched and ripe for ignition.
The Dixie Fire is the largest single fire in California history and the largest currently burning in the U.S. Nearly a quarter of all firefighters assigned to Western fires are fighting California blazes, said Rocky Oplinger, an incident commander.
Heat waves and historic drought tied to climate change have made wildfires harder to fight in the American West. Scientists have said climate change has made the region much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. The fires across the West come as parts of Europe are also fighting large blazes spurred by tinder-dry conditions.
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In southeastern Montana, the small towns of Ashland and Lame Deer were ordered evacuated Tuesday as a wildfire threatened hundreds of homes outside the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. Rosebud County Sheriff Allen Fulton said flames were being driven by strong, erratic winds.
“We’re actually pretty worried about it,” Fulton said. “It’s jumping highways, it’s jumping streams. A paved road is about a good a fire line as we could ask for, and it’s going over that in spots.”
Northwest of the Dixie Fire in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, hundreds of homes remained threatened by two fires. However, nearly 50% of the McFarland Fire was contained. New evacuation orders were issued Monday for residents near the Monument Fire, which was only about 3% contained.
South of the Dixie Fire, firefighters prevented further growth of the River Fire, which broke out last Wednesday near the community of Colfax and destroyed 68 homes. It was nearly 80% contained.