With months of fire season ahead, blazes across California explode in size, taxing resources. Ten are reported dead in fire sweeping Butte and nearby counties.
Like the winds that race down the mountainsides near Los Angeles each fall, gaining heat and fanning the flames as they go, the gales that struck Oregon over the weekend have turned small fires into infernos.
In the far north, the Slater fire took off Wednesday night, growing from 30,000 acres to more than 120,000 by 7 a.m. Thursday. It crossed the border into Oregon, a state already besieged by its own fires, with half a million people under evacuation orders. Two bodies have been recovered in the footprint of the blaze.
The sheer number of wildfires across California and the parched West has left fire crews stretched like never before.Advertisement Both the August and North Complex fires were ignited in that storm, continued burning in the back country, then exploded with this week’s heatwave and high winds.Two others — the SCU Lightning Complex in the hills east of San Jose and the LNU Lightning Complex in the North Bay and wine country — are still burning but almost entirely contained. They account for the third and fourth largest since California began keeping records in 1932.
A second salvo of new fire ignitions worsened the dire situation, with the Bobcat fire in the San Gabriel Mountains, the Valley Fire southeast San Diego County, the El Dorado fire near Yucaipa, the Creek fire roaring out of the Sierra National Forest.
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