LOS ANGELES –More than 5,000 firefighters are battling the Dixie fire, which is spewing massive clouds of smoke into the atmosphere that can be seen from space.
By late July, the number of acres burnt in California had increased by more than 250 percent since 2020, the state’s deadliest wildfire year in modern history.
The Dixie Fire has now burned 446,723 acres across four counties, up from 434,813 the day before. That region is greater than Los Angeles, and it has surpassed the scale of southern Oregon‘s enormous Bootleg Fire.
However, lower temperatures and calmer winds swept into the region overnight, providing relief to weary firefighters, according to the state agency Calfire.
The thick smoke that had been holding down winds and temperatures in Northern California‘s beautiful forestlands began to clear Sunday, as firefighters battling the state’s largest single blaze braced for a return of fire-friendly weather.
The winds were not expected to reach the dizzying heights that helped the Dixie Fire explode last week.
“The live trees that are out there now have a lower fuel moisture than you would find when you go to a hardware store or a lumber yard and get that piece of lumber that’s kiln dried,” Mark Brunton, operations section chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said in an online briefing Sunday morning. “It’s that dry, so it doesn’t take much for any sort of embers, sparks, or small flaming front to get that going.”
The fire burned much of Greenville on Wednesday and Thursday, fueled by high winds and bone-dry vegetation, destroying 370 houses and structures and threatening over 14,000 structures in the northern Sierra Nevada.
The Dixie Fire, which occurred earlier this week, left the Gold Rush town of Greenville burned and in ruins, but no one was killed. According to the Los Angeles Times, it has also burnt through the tiny hamlet of Canyondam.
Police have been confronted with armed citizens who refuse to budge as they encourage thousands of residents to leave. When this happens, law enforcement authorities are asking homeowners for the names of their relatives so that they can be alerted if the fire kills them.
Ironically, the Dixie Fire’s movement northeastward has been halted in part because it has reached the “scar” of an earlier blaze, the 2007 Moonlight Fire, which has reduced available fuel, according to the CalFire website.
