26,000 Evacuate as Wildfire Spreads in Northern California

INA-  sources

When a fast-moving wildfire began marching across thousands of acres of Butte County on Tuesday, David Pittman didn’t panic. He packed up his family, including their 90-pound African sulcata tortoise, and drove to his sister’s house across town in Oroville, Calif.
That’s where he’s planning to stay for the next several days — at least until firefighters get a handle on the Thompson fire, which has engulfed several homes and vehicles and has prompted about 26,000 people to evacuate, including Mr. Pittman.
“I hate to say it, but we’re experienced in this kind of stuff,” he said on Wednesday.

Mr. Pittman, 70, is the mayor of Oroville, a small Northern California town that has roots in the Gold Rush and is tucked near the state’s second-largest reservoir about 65 miles north of Sacramento. He is also a retired local fire chief who has watched his region face calamity after calamity in recent years.

In 2017, officials ordered residents to flee Oroville as thundering rapids from an emergency spillway at nearby Oroville Dam threatened to overwhelm the town. The next year, in 2018, one of the deadliest wildfires in American history, the Camp fire, killed 85 people and nearly wiped the town of Paradise — about 20 miles north of Oroville — off the map.

In 2020, a record-breaking fire season left millions of acres scorched across California, including “right into the city of Oroville,” Mr. Pittman said. In 2021, the second largest fire ever recorded in California, the Dixie fire, burned an area larger than New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas combined. It was sparked by damaged PG&E power lines near the waterway that bisects Oroville, the Feather River.
The various disasters, experts have said, are symptoms of widening climate extremes, which have plunged the West into near-constant whiplash between catastrophic floods and raging wildfires. This year, climate scientists warned that a hot summer in the West could dry out vegetation that grew abundant during a wet winter, turning what was lush green into prime tinder and making for a hazardous fire season.




source: The New York Times