A powerful storm barreled toward Southern California after flooding highways, toppling trees and causing mud flows in areas burned bare by recent fires across the northern part of the state. Drenching showers and strong winds accompanied the weekend’s arrival of an atmospheric river — a long and wide plume of moisture pulled in from the Pacific Ocean. The National Weather Service’s Sacramento office warned of “potentially historic rain.” Flooding was reported across the San Francisco Bay Area, closing streets in Berkeley, inundating Oakland’s Bay Bridge toll plaza and overflowing rivers in Napa and Sonoma counties. Power poles were downed and tens of thousands of people in the North Bay were without electricity. By Sunday morning, Mount Tamalpais just north of San Francisco had recorded a half foot (15 centimeters) of rainfall during the previous 12 hours, the weather service said. Read:Plane crash kills 2, burns homes in California neighborhood “Some of our higher elevation locations could see 6, 7, 8 inches of rain before we’re all said and done,” weather service meteorologist Sean Miller said. About 150 miles (241 kilometers) to the north, the California Highway Patrol closed a stretch of State Route 70 in Butte and Plumas counties because of multiple landslides within the massive Dixie Fire burn scar. “We have already had several collisions this morning for vehicles hydroplaning, numerous trees falling, and several roadways that are experiencing flooding,” the highway patrol’s office in Oroville tweeted on Sunday. “If you can stay home and off the roads today, please do. If you are out on the roads, please use extreme caution.” The same storm system also slammed Oregon and Washington state, causing power outages affecting tens of thousands of people. Two people were killed when a tree fell on a vehicle in the greater Seattle area. Eastside Fire & Rescue responded to the scene of the fatalaties near Preston, Washington, which is about 20 miles east of Seattle. In California’s Colusa and Yolo counties, state highways 16 and 20 were shut for several miles due to mudslides, the state Department of Transportation said. Burn areas remain a concern, as land devoid of vegetation can’t soak up heavy rainfall as quickly, increasing the likelihood of flash flooding. “If you are in the vicinity of a recent burn scar and haven’t already, prepare now for likely debris flows,” the Sacramento weather service tweeted. “If you are told to evacuate by local officials, or you feel threatened, do not hesitate to do so. If it is too late to evacuate, get to higher ground.” South of San Francisco, evacuation orders were in effect in the Santa Cruz Mountains over concerns that several inches of rain could trigger debris flows in the CZU Lightning Complex Fire burn scar when the storm moves through early Monday. Further south, parts of western Santa Barbara County saw evacuation warnings upgraded to orders in the area burned by this month’s Alisal Fire. Read: California wildfire dangers may be spreading south Strong winds were also expected, with gusts of up to 60 mph (97 kph) at the windiest spots in Northern California. Elevations above 9,000 feet (2,745 meters) in the Sierra Nevada could get 18 inches of snow or more from Sunday until Monday morning. Recent storms have helped contain some of the nation’s largest wildfires this year. But it remains to be seen if the wet weather will make a dent in the drought that’s plaguing California and the western United States. California’s climate is hotter and drier now and that means the rain and snow that does fall is likely to evaporate or absorb into the soil. California’s 2021 water year, which ended Sept. 30, was the second driest on record and last year’s was the fifth driest on record. Some of the state’s most important reservoirs are at record low levels.

A century-old building originally used as a laundry by Chinese workers at Yosemite’s iconic Wawona Hotel has been restored and turned into a visitor’s attraction, recognizing Chinese Americans’ contributions to the early history of the national park. Officials unveiled a new sign Friday marking the Chinese Laundry Building in Yosemite Valley, the Fresno Bee reports. New exhibits inside tell the story of Chinese workers who helped build Tioga Road and Wawona Road, critical infrastructure that made tourism to the park possible. Read: China's Xi leads Martyr's Day ceremony amid patriotism drive The building — later used as a storage facility — is part of a cluster of structures that will make up the new Yosemite History Center, which will tell the histories of immigrants who made the park what it is today, said Park Ranger Adam Ramsey. “Chinese people have been a big part of communities throughout the Sierra Nevada for a really long time, and it’s about time that we started sharing that history here in Yosemite,” Ramsey said. According to research conducted by Park Ranger Yenyen Chan, in 1883 Chinese workers helped build the 56-mile (90-kilometer) Tioga Road in just 130 days. The stunning route across the Sierra Nevada reaches 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) in elevation and serves as one of the park’s main roads. Chinese workers were also employed in Yosemite as cooks, laundry workers and gardeners. Many first came to California during the Gold Rush, bringing with them skills learned in China about construction, engineering, agriculture, medicine and textiles that made a significant impact in America’s early success, Chan said. Read: China declares all cryptocurrency transactions illegal She said Yosemite’s Chinese history and their contributions were erased from memory because of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act passed by Congress to prevent any more Chinese from entering this country in search of work. The law blocked Chinese immigration for 60 years in this country. Members of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, who supported the building’s renovation, said they were gratified to see Yosemite include the Chinese in the park’s origin story. “Something like this really resonates with a lot of people in my generation,” said Eugene Moy, a past president of the society. “We’ve been here since the 1870s, so to be able to see this has deep meaning, because a lot of us, oftentimes, are relegated to the margins. We aren’t always perceived as being full-fledged Americans when the reality is that people have been here for three, four, five generations, for 150 years.”

As a new volcanic vent blew open and unstoppable rivers of molten rock flowed toward the sea, authorities on a Spanish island warned Tuesday that more dangers lie ahead for residents, including earthquakes, lava flows, toxic gases, volcanic ash and acid rain. Several small earthquakes shook the island of La Palma in the Atlantic Ocean off northwest Africa on Tuesday, keeping nerves on edge after a volcanic eruption on Sunday. The island, with a population of 85,000, is part of the Canary Islands archipelago, a key tourist destination for Europeans. Authorities said the new fissure demonstrated that the area was unstable and unsafe, and kept people at least 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) away. The rivers of lava, up to six meters (nearly 20 feet) high, rolled down hillsides, burning and crushing everything in their path, as they gradually closed in on the island’s more densely populated coast. One was bearing down on Todoque, where more than 1,000 people live, and where emergency services were preparing evacuations. Read:New England preps for 1st hurricane in 30 years with Henri So far, the eruption has destroyed around 190 houses and forced the evacuation of 6,000 people. “The truth is that it’s a tragedy to see people losing their properties,” said municipal worker Fernando Díaz in the town of El Paso. The lava’s advance has slowed to about 120 meters (400 feet) an hour, according to the head of the Canary Island Volcanic Emergency Plan, Miguel Ángel Morcuende, and wasn’t expected to reach the Atlantic Ocean before Wednesday. Canary Islands government chief Ángel Víctor Torres said “when (the lava) reaches the sea, it will be a critical moment.” Read:'We fought a great battle': Greece defends wildfire response The meeting of the lava, whose temperature exceeds 1,000 degrees Celsius (more than 1,800 F), with a body of water could cause explosions and produce clouds of toxic gas. Torres asked locals to remember the island’s last eruption in 1971, when one person died after inhaling the gas emitted as lava met the water. A change in the wind direction blew the ashes from the volcano across a vast area on the western side of the island, with the black particles blanketing everything. Volcanic ash is an irritant for the eyes and lungs. The volcano has also been spewing out between 8,000 and 10,500 tons of sulfur dioxide — which also affects the lungs — every day, the Volcanology Institute said. Adding to the dangers, the emergence of new cracks in the earth spewing lava cannot be ruled out, said Nemesio Pérez, head of the Canary Islands Volcanology Institute, who noted there is “important superficial seismic activity in the area.” The new fissure that appeared Monday night is 900 meters (3,000 feet) north of the Cumbre Vieja ridge, where the volcano first erupted Sunday after a week of thousands of small earthquakes. That earthquake swarm warned authorities that an eruption was likely and allowed many people to be evacuated, avoiding casualties. Read:‘Nowhere to run’: UN report says global warming nears limits The new fissure opened after what the Canary Islands Volcanology Institute said was a 3.8-magnitude quake. Scientists say the lava flows could last for weeks or months. Torres described the lava-hit region as a “catastrophe zone” and said he would request money to rebuild roads, water pipes and create temporary accommodations for families who have lost their homes as well as their farmland. Spain’s King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia are to visit the area on Thursday.

Egyptian scientists say the fossil of a four-legged prehistoric whale, unearthed over a decade ago in the country’s Western Desert, is that of a previously unknown species. The creature, an ancestor of the modern-day whale, is believed to have lived 43 million years ago. The prehistoric whale, known as semi-aquatic because it lived both on land and sea, sported features of an accomplished hunter, the team’s leading paleontologist, Hesham Sallam, told The Associated Press — features that make it stand out among other whale fossils. The fossil was first found by a team of Egyptian environmentalists in 2008 in an area that was covered by seas in prehistoric times, but researchers only published their findings confirming a new species last month. Sallam said that his team did not start examining the fossil until 2017 because he wanted to assemble the best and the most talented Egyptian paleontologists for the study. Read:Fossil leaves may reveal climate in last era of dinosaurs “This is the first time in the history of Egyptian vertebrate paleontology to have an Egyptian team leading a documentation of a new genus and species of four-legged whale,” said Sallam. The fossil sheds light on the evolution of whales from herbivore land mammals into carnivorous species that today live exclusively in water. The transition took place over roughly 10 million years, according to an article published on the discovery in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Egypt’s Western Desert region is already known for the so-called Whale Valley, or Wadi Al-Hitan, a tourist attraction and the country’s only natural World Heritage site that contains fossil remains of another type of prehistoric whales. The newly discovered creature belongs to the family of Protecetids, extinct semi-aquatic whales that lived from 59 to 34 million years ago, Sallam said. It would have walked on land but also hunted in the water. “This is yet another new species of early whales from the time when they retained four functional limbs,” said Jonathan Geisler, an expert on the evolutionary history of mammals with New York Institute of Technology. He said that the location of the discovery in Egypt is also a clue as to when and how they spread around the globe. Geisler was not involved in the find. The oldest fossil whales are about 50 million years old and are believed to have originated in modern-day Pakistan and India. However, scientists have not been able to reach a conclusive answer as to when whales moved out of their point of origin to all the world’s oceans. “This new species by itself cannot answer that question, but when viewed in the context of other fossil discoveries, suggests that this dispersal occurred 43 million years ago,” said Geisler, adding the new find could possibly serve as a link between Indo-Pakistan and North American regions. The fossil whale has been named Phiomicetus Anubis, after the god of death in ancient Egypt. Read:Japan aims to bring back soil samples from Mars moon by 2029 “We chose the name Anubis because it had a strong and deadly bite,” said Sallam, professor of paleontology at Mansoura University in Egypt. “It could kill any creature it crossed paths with.” The new species stands out for its elongated skull and snout that suggest it was an efficient carnivore capable of grasping and chewing its prey, he said. It was about 3 meters (9 feet long) and weighed around 600 kilograms, according to researchers. It is also believed to have had sharp hearing and sense of smell. The discovery followed a four-year collaboration between Egyptian paleontologists and U.S-based scientists, Sallam added. His team has previously made headlines worldwide with their 2018 discovery of Mansourasaurus, a new species of long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs that lived in the Nile Delta province of Mansoura.

A swath of the Florida Panhandle was under a tropical storm warning after Tropical Storm Mindy made landfall Wednesday night. The storm touched down over St. Vincent Island, about 10 miles (15 km) west southwest of Apalachicola, according to the National Hurricane Center. Read:Ida deaths rise by 11 in New Orleans; Louisiana toll now 26 Mindy could cause as much as 6 inches (15 centimeters) of rainfall across the Florida Panhandle and portions of southern Georgia and South Carolina through Thursday morning, the National Hurricane Center said. Scattered flash, urban, and small-stream floods are possible. Mindy’s arrival occurred only a few hours after it had strengthened into a tropical storm Wednesday evening. The storm had maximum sustained winds of 45 mph (75 km/h) and was moving northeast at 21 mph (33 km/), forecasters said. The tropical storm warning is in effect from Mexico Beach, Florida, to the Steinhatchee River to the east. That area is about 300 miles (500 kilometers) east of southern Louisiana, where Hurricane Ida made landfall late last month. The region is still recovering from the deadly and destructive Category 4 storm. Read:Officials anticipate progress fighting fire near Lake Tahoe Mindy is the 13th-named storm of what has been another busy Atlantic hurricane season. According to a tweet from Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach, the average date for the 13th-named storm from 1991-2020 was Oct. 24.

The death toll in Louisiana from Hurricane Ida rose to 26 Wednesday, after health officials reported 11 additional deaths in New Orleans, mostly older people who perished from the heat. The announcement was grim news amid signs the city was returning to normal with almost fully restored power and a lifted nighttime curfew. While New Orleans was generally rebounding from the storm, hundreds of thousands of people outside the city remained without electricity and some of the hardest-hit areas still had no water. Across southeastern Louisiana, 250,000 students were unable to return to classrooms 10 days after Ida roared ashore with 150 mph (240 kph) winds. The latest deaths attributed to Ida happened between Aug. 30 and Monday, but were just confirmed as storm-related by the Orleans Parish coroner, the Louisiana Department of Health said in a statement. Nine of the New Orleans deaths — of people ages 64 to 79 — came from “excessive heat during an extended power outage,” while the two others were from carbon monoxide poisoning, the department said. More than a million people were left without power, including the entire city of New Orleans, when Ida struck on Aug. 29. The state’s largest power company, Entergy, said it expected to have electricity in the city restored to 90% by Wednesday evening. Read:New Orleans: Seniors left in dark, hot facilities after Ida Meanwhile, the New Orleans Police Department and Mayor LaToya Cantrell lifted an 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew they had imposed two days after the hurricane hit. Across New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana, families are still waiting to hear when their children can return to school, as districts assessed hurricane damage. Prior to Ida, schools around Louisiana had been open despite widespread cases of COVID-19, although under a statewide mask mandate for all indoor locations. “We need to get those kids back with us as soon as we possibly can,” said Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley. In New Orleans, School Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. said damage to schools appeared to be mostly minimal, but power needs to be restored to all buildings, and teachers, staff and families need to return to the city to get schools up and running. “Now more than ever, our children stand to benefit from the comfort that structured and routine daily schooling can bring,” Lewis said in a statement Wednesday. “So, let’s all come together to reopen our schools quickly and safely.” Lewis said he expects classes for some will resume as early as next week and that all students will be back a week after that. No school reopening estimates have been provided for the five parishes that were hardest hit by Hurricane Ida and which are home to about 320,000 people: Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. James, St. Charles and St. John the Baptist. In those parishes, 96% of utility customers were still without power Wednesday. Bucket trucks and heavy power equipment were ubiquitous, but the task facing linemen remained daunting. Downed power poles and slack or snapped lines were still evident on long stretches of U.S. Highway 90 in St. Charles Parish. Heavy equipment trucks could be seen ferrying new poles to the area. Read: Outside of New Orleans, an even longer road to Ida recovery Farther south, in the Terrebonne Parish city of Houma, trucks with linemen were on every street, and as the day progressed there were signs of progress: Traffic lights started flickering on, although sporadically, on busy Grand Caillou road by early afternoon. Linemen also were working south of Houma, in rural Terrebonne along Bayou Grand Caillou. But many of the homes were in no shape to connect. Coy Verdin was staying at his son’s house in Houma. The home the 52-year-old fisherman shares with his wife, Pamela, near the bayou was a soggy, smelly mess, all but destroyed in the storm. “All the ceilings fell. You can see daylight through the roof,” Verdin said. “All we have is basically a shell.” Ida scattered most of his 200 crab traps to parts unknown. “The only thing I have left is my boat and some of my commercial fishing rigging,” he said. The St. John the Baptist Parish School System website said all schools and offices will be closed “until further notification.” Lafourche Parish Schools Superintendent Jarod Martin indicated a “long and extensive road to recovery” on that school system’s website, with no timeline for a return in sight. “Until power is restored to our facilities and we’re able to obtain further information regarding damage to the infrastructure of our schools, we’re unable to provide an estimated date for a return to in-person learning,” the St. James Parish public school system said in an update posted Wednesday. Statewide, about 342,000 homes and businesses remained without power Wednesday, according to the Louisiana Public Service Commission. Access to fuel also remained difficult, with the website GasBuddy.com reporting about 48% of gas stations in Baton Rouge had no gasoline. About 56% of stations in New Orleans were also dry. Read: Cleanup boats on scene of large Gulf oil spill following Ida About 44,000 people were still without running water in Louisiana, the state health department reported. That’s significantly lower than the hundreds of thousands of people who had no water immediately after Ida’s landfall. Still, more than 570,000 people were being told to boil their water for safety. In many neighborhoods, homes remain uninhabitable. About 3,200 people are in mass shelters around Louisiana while another 25,000 people whose houses have been damaged are staying in hotel rooms through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s transitional sheltering program. Louisiana’s secretary of state announced that fall elections will be pushed back by more than a month because of the storm. In addition to the death and destruction Ida caused in Louisiana, the storm’s remnants brought historic flooding, record rains and tornados from Virginia to Massachusetts, killing at least 50 more people.

While firefighters confront aggressive winds and flames in some southeast sections of the Caldor Fire, many crews are shifting their focus to repairing areas for residents to return in the coming days — a sign of confidence that they’ll continue to make progress containing the wildfire. Officials lifted the mandatory evacuation order for the 22,000 residents of South Lake Tahoe on Sunday, allowing some residents to trickle back into the smoke-cloaked city. But the wildfire remains 48% and areas south of the resort town like Meyers and the ski resort Kirkwood remain battlefields for the more than 5,000 personnel working to contain the 338 square-mile (876 square-kilometer) wildfire from threatening Lake Tahoe, the surrounding resort communities and the homes of employees who staff casinos, restaurants and ski resorts. Read: Lake Tahoe residents relieved homes spared from wildfire “We’re also looking long term — what’s going to happen, four, five or six days down the road. We want to make sure we’re planning and having stuff ready and completed so that when (repopulation) comes available,” Cal Fire official John Davis said. “And if it comes sooner, we are already in the planning process for the whole area that’s still under evacuation order.” When the Caldor Fire gobbled up pine trees and crossed the Sierra Nevada last week, South Lake Tahoe, transformed into a ghost town. The city appeared slightly rebounded on Monday, yet mostly empty compared to normal holiday weekends. “I was honestly convinced this place was gonna go down,” Lake Tahoe Community College student Dakota Jones said Monday upon his return. “It was nice to see that I was wrong.” The lifting of mandatory evacuation orders for the Tahoe area marked a milestone in the fight against the Caldor Fire, which erupted Aug. 14 and spread across dense forests, tree-dotted granite cliffs and scattered cabins and hamlets in the northern Sierra Nevada. At its peak, the fire was burning as many as 1,000 acres an hour. Through tactics including bulldozing defense lines and air-dropping 1,600 gallons (6,057 liters) of Lake Tahoe water onto the flames, crews have successfully carved a perimeter around much of the wildfire. Read: Lake Tahoe evacuees hope to return home as wildfire slows Fire officials said they expected crews in hot spots to continue to confront challenging conditions, but hoped to make enough progress to lift evacuation orders still in place in the coming days. But much will depend on the weather, particularly the nature of wind and rain that thunderstorms expected next weekend may yield. Winds have been easing, allowing firefighters to make progress containing the conflagration, but authorities remain concerned about southwest winds sparking spot fires. In Northern California, the weather is expected to cool slightly and the humidity to rise starting on Tuesday. “We are drier than I have seen on my 20 days on this fire,” Jim Dudley, incident meteorologist, said Monday. “There’s a lot of potential weather-wise for little things to become maybe not so little.” California and much of the U.S. West have experienced dozens of wildfires in the past two months as the warming, drought-stricken region swelters under dry heat and winds drives flames through vegetation. More than 14,500 firefighters were battling 14 active fires in the state on Monday, and since the year began more than 7,000 wildfires have devoured 3,000 square miles (8,000 square kilometers). Read:High winds threaten to whip up flames approaching Lake Tahoe No deaths have been reported specifically from the fires, which have shut down all national forests in the state. Further south, the National Weather Service in Oxnard, California said hot dry weather was expected for interior valleys and deserts with elevated fire conditions through Friday.

Connor Jones sunbathed with his dog on the otherwise empty beach at Ski Run Marina on Monday, as residents trickling back into town filled up their cars at a gas station behind him and employees of a water sports rental company docked jet skis and boats they had anchored away from the shores of Lake Tahoe to prevent them from igniting from wildfire. He and others living in the resort city of South Lake Tahoe breathed a collective sigh of relief on Sunday when officials downgraded a mandatory evacuation order put in place a week ago to a warning. “I figure they wouldn’t take repopulation lightly and, if they made the decision to allow people to come back, then they were probably confident that they’re not going to have any issues,” he said. When the Caldor Fire gobbled up pine trees and crossed the Sierra Nevada last week, South Lake Tahoe, a scenic community of 22,000 people on the California-Nevada state line, transformed into a smoke-choked ghost town. Read: Lake Tahoe evacuees hope to return home as wildfire slows After worrying throughout all of last week about the fire approaching their homes and landmarks they hold dear, residents who returned on Monday said they were thankful firefighters had stopped the blazes on the town’s doorstep. But it appeared most residents remained away and most shops remained closed in usually thriving Labor Day destination town. While many large wildfires have ripped through large swaths of Northern California in recent years, it’s the first time in more than a decade that South Lake Tahoe residents saw a blaze get this close. As of Monday evening, 5,072 firefighting personnel were battling the Caldor Fire, which had scorched roughly 338 square miles (876 square kilometers). The threat to the region hasn’t entirely vanished, with mandatory evacuation orders remaining for parts of unincorporated El Dorado County south of South Lake Tahoe, including Meyers and Christmas Valley. And questions remain about the smoke blanketing the region and how long it may take for the clean air and crystalline waters that draw millions of tourists to the area annually to return. Authorities warned residents, that in the absence of humans, bears had gone to town, spreading trash. “The delicate balance between humans and bears has been upset,” and anyone who thinks a bear may have entered their home should call law enforcement, El Dorado County Sheriff’s Sgt. Simon Brown said. Chirawat Mekrakseree said he had seen signs. of bears sifting through the trash at his restaurant on Lake Tahoe Boulevard, My Thai Cuisine. Mekrakseree plans to reopen and start serving curries and noodle dishes on Wednesday but worries the tourists he depends on may not come back while the smoke lingers. And he doesn’t know what to tell his staff about when business will return to normal after an already uncertain year with the pandemic, he said. “Everybody has expenses, rent, car payments,” he said as he power-washed ash off outdoor picnic tables. “They’re asking me how long (until they return to work) and I can’t tell them how long.” Read:High winds threaten to whip up flames approaching Lake Tahoe California and much of the U.S. West have experienced dozens of wildfires in the past two months as the drought-stricken region swelters under hot, dry weather and winds drives flames through bone-dry vegetation. More than 14,500 firefighters were battling 14 active fires in the state on Monday, and since the year began more than 7,000 wildfires have devoured 3,000 square miles (8,000 square kilometers). The lifting of mandatory evacuation orders for the Tahoe area marked a milestone in the fight against the Caldor Fire, which erupted Aug. 14 and spread across nearly 338 square miles (876 square kilometers) of dense national parks and forests, tree-dotted granite cliffs and scattered cabins and hamlets in the northern Sierra Nevada. At its peak, the fire was burning as many as 1,000 acres an hour and virtually razed the small community of Grizzly Flats. In recent days, winds eased and firefighters took advantage of the better weather to hack, burn and bulldoze fire lines, managing to contain 44% of the perimeter by Monday. Authorities said containment lines were holding up but they were concerned about extremely low humidity and a slight increase in wind, which could spur spot fires up to half a mile (0.8 kilometers) away. “We are drier than I have seen on my 20 days on this fire,” Jim Dudley, incident meteorologist, said Monday. “There’s a lot of potential weather-wise for little things to become maybe not so little.” In South Lake Tahoe, gas stations and grocery stores quickly reopened but eateries and a ski gear shops remained closed. Dakota Jones returned Monday to his apartment with his roommates, who were in the process of moving when the fire approached, and a U-Haul full of their belongings. The Lake Tahoe Community College student said he worried he’d find buildings damaged and ashen, and was pleasantly surprised to see the town largely untouched. “I was honestly convinced this place was gonna go down,” said Jones, who is not related to Connor. “It was nice to see that I was wrong.” Read: Wildfire evacuees flood Lake Tahoe roads in rush to flee California has experienced increasingly larger and deadlier wildfires in recent years as climate change has made the West much warmer and drier over the past 30 years. Scientists have said weather will continue to be more extreme and wildfires more frequent, destructive and unpredictable. No deaths have been reported specifically from the fires, which have shut down all national forests in the state. In Northern California, the weather is expected to cool slightly and the humidity to rise starting on Tuesday. Further south, the National Weather Service in Oxnard, California said hot dry weather was expected for interior valleys and deserts with elevated fire conditions through Friday.

Firefighters are making progress on a California wildfire threatening South Lake Tahoe, officials said Saturday, lifting hopes for tens of thousands of residents who are waiting this weekend to return to the resort town. Lighter winds and higher humidity continue to reduce the spread of flames, and fire crews were quick to take advantage by doubling down on burning and cutting fire lines around the Caldor Fire. Bulldozers with giant blades, crews armed with shovels and a fleet of aircraft dropping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and fire retardant helped keep the fire’s advance to a couple of thousand acres — a fraction of its explosive spread last month and the smallest increase in two weeks. Read: High winds threaten to whip up flames approaching Lake Tahoe “The incident continues to look better and better every day,” Tim Burton, an operations chief with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention, told firefighters at a Saturday briefing. “A large part of that is due to your hard work as well as the weather cooperating in the last week or so.” The northeast section of the immense Sierra Nevada blaze was still within a few miles of South Lake Tahoe and the Nevada state line. But fire officials said it hadn’t made any significant advances in several days and wasn’t challenging containment lines in long sections of its perimeter. With more than one third of the 334-square-mile (866-square-kilometer) blaze surrounded, authorities allowed more people back into their homes on the western and northern sides of the fires Friday afternoon. Mandatory evacuation orders on the Nevada side of the state line were lifted, but some areas remained on a warning status. Douglas County authorities urged residents to stay alert, saying the fire still has the potential to threaten homes. Meanwhile, there was no timeline for allowing the return of 22,000 South Lake Tahoe residents. Authorities were taking the decision on whether to lift South Lake Tahoe’s evacuation day by day. “It’s all based on fire behavior,” said Jake Cagle, a fire operations section chief. “For now, things are looking good ... we’re getting close.” The resort area can easily accommodate 100,000 people on a busy weekend but was eerily empty — except for the occasional, wandering bear — just before the holiday weekend. The wildfire dealt a major blow to an economy that heavily depends on tourism and was starting to rebound this summer from pandemic shutdowns. Fire crews still had a lot of work to do in the grasslands, timber stands and granite outcroppings. And despite the overall better weather, winds could still be “squirrely” and locally erratic as they hit the region’s ridges and deep canyons. Read: Wildfire evacuees flood Lake Tahoe roads in rush to flee The fire — which began Aug. 14, was named after the road where it started and raged through densely forested, craggy areas — has destroyed nearly 900 homes, businesses and other buildings. It was still considered a threat to more than 30,000 more structures. Wildfires this year have burned at least 1,500 homes and decimated several mountain hamlets. The Dixie Fire, burning about 65 miles (105 kilometers) north of the Caldor Fire, is the second-largest wildfire in state history at about 1,385 square miles (3,585 square kilometers) and is 55% contained. California has experienced increasingly larger and deadlier wildfires in recent years as climate change has made the West much warmer and drier over the past 30 years. Scientists have said weather will continue to be more extreme and wildfires more frequent, destructive and unpredictable. No deaths have been reported so far this fire season.

The coronavirus pandemic claimed Kendall Duthu’s job as a cook at a jambalaya restaurant. Then Hurricane Ida claimed his house. The 26-year-old resident of Dulac, Louisiana, is now living out of his car with his girlfriend after Ida roared ashore a week ago Sunday, splintering homes in its path. Now he doesn’t know what’s next. On Saturday, Duthu collected a container of red beans and rice from volunteers in nearby Houma who handed out ice, water and meals to shell-shocked storm survivors. He stopped to eat inside his Infiniti, its windshield shattered. “Next stop, I don’t really ...” he said, trailing off. “We’ve just been living day by day.” Read: Cleanup boats on scene of large Gulf oil spill following Ida Both Dulac and Houma are in Terrebonne Parish, among the hardest-hit areas of Louisiana battered to an unprecedented degree by Hurricane Ida. Though Louisiana’s largest electric utility, Entergy, estimates most residents in New Orleans will have power by Wednesday, recovery efforts outside of the city could be a much longer slog. Meanwhile, residents continue to face food, water and gas shortages while battling heat and humidity. Some parishes outside New Orleans were battered for hours by winds of 100 mph (160 kph) or more. Fully restoring electricity to some of these southeastern parishes could take until the end of the month, according to Entergy President and CEO Phillip May. Ida damaged or destroyed more than 22,000 power poles, more than hurricanes Katrina, Zeta and Delta combined, an impact May called “staggering.” More than 5,200 transformers failed and nearly 26,000 spans of wire — the stretch of transmission wires between poles — were down. By Saturday morning, power was restored to about 282,000 customers from the peak of 902,000 who lost power after Ida. Outside of Dulac, 45-year-old shrimper Jay Breaux stood in front of his home, snapped open by the storm. Breaux could see a bed exposed through a cratered wall and a lawn chair dangling from the debris. But he smiled widely, saying his family wasn’t doing as badly as others. “It don’t pay to cry about it,” he said of Ida, the latest storm to hit his small town along the bayou. “I got 10 or 12 of them things under my belt. But this one here is the worst.” Read: Searches, sorrow in wake of Ida’s destructive, deadly floods At least 16 deaths were blamed on the storm in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. In the Northeast, Ida’s remnants dumped record-breaking rain and killed at least 50 people from Virginia to Connecticut. Louisiana’s 12 storm-related deaths included five nursing home residents evacuated ahead of the hurricane along with hundreds of other seniors to a warehouse in Louisiana, where health officials said conditions became unsafe. On Saturday evening, State Health Officer Dr. Joseph Kanter ordered the immediate closure of the seven nursing facilities that sent residents to the Tangipahoa Parish warehouse facility. “The lack of regard for these vulnerable residents’ wellbeing is an affront to human dignity. We have lost trust in these nursing homes to provide adequate care for their residents,” Kanter said. As recovery efforts continued, state officials were monitoring a system of disturbed weather in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche, which appeared set to move into the central Gulf of Mexico closer to Louisiana. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said Saturday the state is planning an exercise to assess its emergency response if needed. Predictions so far don’t show the system strengthening into a hurricane, but he said “even if it’s a tropical storm, we’re in no state to receive that much rainfall at this time.” “We can’t take the playbook we normally use because the people and assets are no longer where they would have been,” Edwards said. “How do you staff up shelters you need for the new storm and continue to test for COVID? My head’s getting painful just thinking about it. ... We will be as ready as we can be, but I’m praying we don’t have to deal with that.” The lower Mississippi River reopened to all vessel traffic in New Orleans and key ports throughout southeastern Louisiana after power lines from a downed transmission tower were removed, the U.S. Coast Guard said. Read:More than 45 dead after Ida’s remnants blindside Northeast USA New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city would offer transportation starting Saturday to any resident looking to leave the city and get to a public shelter. By the end of Saturday, city agencies conducting wellness checks had evacuated hundreds of people out of eight senior living complexes where officials deemed conditions unfit for living. The coroner’s office is investigating four post-storm deaths that occurred at three of those facilities. In suburban New Orleans, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joseph Lopinto urged people “to calm down” as he announced Saturday that a man wanted in the shooting death a day earlier of another man during a dispute in a line at a gas station was in custody. Meanwhile Saturday, Coast Guard cleanup crews were responding to a sizable oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico following the storm. The spill, which is ongoing, appears to be coming from an underwater source at an offshore drilling lease about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) south of Port Fourchon, Louisiana.