California Fire Now the Largest in State History

MATHER, Calif. — Inside the state’s emergency command center here, the numbers on a large screen show the scope and reach of California’s record-setting wildfire season glowing in red, blue and yellow: nearly 600,000 acres burned. More than 13,000 firefighters battling blazes. More than 2,300 members of the National Guard pulled into the fight.

The numbers, though, do not begin to tell the story of the challenge and complexity of the firefighting effort, with temperatures still soaring. Fires are moving faster than anyone has ever seen, and barriers that in years past contained fires — bulldozer lines, highways, rivers — are now no match. By midday Tuesday the numbers had already climbed, as more acres burned and more personnel had been rushed to the fires.

All of this comes as California is fighting approximately 17 large fires simultaneously, including the largest in the state’s recorded history. The fire season that has already scorched nearly three times the number of acres over the same period last year has tested the state’s firefighting resources like never before.

“It’s unprecedented to have so many sustained demands for so many resources over such a short amount of time,” said Jonathan Cox, a battalion chief and spokesman with Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency.

The firefighting and recovery efforts — from managing air quality to setting up emergency shelters, to helping residents return home — are led at the highest levels from the command center in Mather, on the outskirts of Sacramento.

Each morning in this high-tech, modern glass building, the top state emergency officials appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown sit down to review what happened the night before. And Tuesday morning, even as news came in overnight that the state was now grappling with the largest fire in its history — called the Mendocino Complex — it was just one subject of many. The roughly 20-person team reviewed weather forecasts, the availability of airplanes to fight various blazes and the efforts to get residents home, and discussed the effects on tourism in Yosemite National Park.

“You cannot wait for the phone to ring here,” said Mark Ghilarducci, the director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, who runs the daily meeting. “You have to be in front of the next disaster.”

California has more firefighters deployed than at any other time in the state’s history. Several dozen firefighters from Australia and New Zealand had been diverted south from the devastating Carr Fire to help with the Mendocino Fire. A battalion of infantry soldiers from the U.S. Army was being dispatched. And with California’s own resources tapped out, 17 states have rushed equipment and firefighters to aid the effort.

A pair of fires called the Mendocino Complex had been growing for nearly two weeks before becoming the largest fire Monday night. The Northern California fire has already consumed roughly 454 square miles and forced tens of thousands of people from their homes.

Both fires began in late July, one of them believed to have been caused by a spark from someone using a hammer, Ghilarducci said.

While the Mendocino Complex has so far burned mostly in remote areas and nobody has died from the fire, officials remain concerned that, given the speed in which it is moving, people and homes could be at risk.

“They are still under threat because the fire is moving east and southeast,” said Kelly Huston, the deputy director of the emergency services office. “This is a very stubborn fire early in an extraordinarily dangerous fire season.” The deadly fires in wine country last fall left residents in Mendocino County shaken, said Adrian Fernandez Baumann, the editor of The Mendocino Voice.

“They are particularly on edge and alert about whether or not they are able to get the accurate evacuation orders,” he said, adding that cellphone and landline services were cut off for days last year. “Between the real sense of isolation and the deaths and the property destruction and the suddenness of it — it killed people who were essentially asleep in bed. So people are shell shocked, people are on edge.”

The current fires have forced the state to use every resource available. There are roughly 5,300 full-time firefighters with Cal Fire, who, along with 1,700 seasonal firefighters throughout the state, are often the first to the front lines of the state’s wildfires. The state also relies on thousands of federal firefighters based in California who respond to fires in national parks and forests. And there are 3,500 inmate firefighters who live in camps throughout the state and are routinely called up — nearly 2,000 were deployed Tuesday.

This summer, firefighters from more than a dozen other states, including Maine, New Jersey, Michigan and South Dakota, have all come to assist.

“There are more fires that are burning more expansively over longer periods of time, and there are fewer resources available to respond, especially to respond quickly,” said Carroll Wills, a spokesman for the California Professional Firefighters, a statewide union. “And local agencies often feel like they can’t send crews to help, because their resources are scarce and they feel like they have to be able to protect their homefront.”

Federal and state fire officials prioritize which fires need the most resources largely based on how many homes are threatened, but that can change in mere hours. This means officials are constantly reassessing the demands for crews and equipment. Fire officials regularly ask for mutual aid from other departments, who also must anticipate the possibility of new fires.

“As large as our firefighting resources are, they’re limited, and we’re rapidly approaching the limits of what our personnel can handle,” said Marti Witter, a fire ecologist with the National Park Service. “Everyone’s in the air, everyone’s on the ground, and the fire’s just getting bigger. So it’s pretty extreme.”

Just in the past two weeks, several crews have responded to the Cranston Fire in Southern California, driving for 10 hours to the Carr Fire in Redding and then heading to the Mendocino Complex Fire about 200 miles south, Cox said. The firefighters are supposed to get a day off every 14 days and another two after three weeks. That does not always happen, Cox said. Even as firefighters travel from one end of the state to another, they move quickly: Cal Fire says there is a maximum of 18 hours in “reflex time,” from the moment a crew is ordered somewhere until the time it arrives. Crews routinely drive all night only to start battling flames in a new location shortly after dawn.

The state also relies on hundreds of private contractors who operate bulldozers and water trucks needed to fight the fires. But there are regularly times when a team managing a particular fire asks for more help and receives a dreaded bureaucratic answer: UTF, short for unable to fulfill.

As the Mendocino Fire continues to rage, the Ferguson Fire has completely shut down swaths of Yosemite National Park indefinitely, leaving the hugely popular destination looking like a ghost town in what should be peak tourist season. Much of the Sacramento Valley is filled with smoke, and tourists in Lake Tahoe have reported canceling their vacations because of the choking haze.

In Redding, the Carr Fire has killed seven people, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and burned so badly that some ravaged neighborhoods are unrecognizable. It is the 12th largest in California history, at about 164,000 acres. While that fire has slowed down and residents have begun to return home, new fires in other parts of the state sent people fleeing Monday night.

A fire in the Cleveland National Forest exploded, easily consuming 4,000 acres and forcing evacuations from two canyons in Orange County. The smoke from that fire could be seen from as far away as Santa Catalina Island. Another Northern California fire in the Stanislaus National Forest destroyed a century-old resort.

Larry Dietz, a Red Cross spokesman, said that there were about 500 people in six Red Cross shelters and in one other shelter that is not affiliated with the agency in Lake, Colusa and Mendocino counties.

“We have a very high proportion of people that are in the shelter requiring significant medical care, such as mobility issues and use of oxygen tanks,” he said. In the past 10 months, fires have killed more than 40 people and burned down thousands of homes. The devastation began with the wine country fires in October, and just two months later fires in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties became the largest in recorded state history. The record lasted only eight months.

The fires are fueled by extreme heat and parched vegetation from years of drought. And firefighters have repeatedly been vexed by the soaring temperatures and rugged terrain of the current fires.

Scientists say climate change is a central factor in creating the atmospheric ingredients that make wildfires like California’s more extreme. Warmer global temperatures, driven by the greenhouse gases emitted from human activity like burning coal and driving cars, has led to droughts as well as more extreme heat waves. The result: increasingly intense fire seasons that start earlier and last longer.

“You combine drought and heat, you get record wildfires. It’s not rocket science,” said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.

As officials rush to respond to the latest fires, they are also deploying new strategies: using complex analyses of weather patterns and historical data, which officials here describe as their “crystal ball,” to predict where the next fire will be, and sending forces to be on standby. In recent weeks, officials on five occasions have dispatched firefighters to locations where they believed fires could erupt, and in one case, in Santa Barbara, one did.

“It’s a big chess game,” Ghilarducci said. And even as the fires burn, analysts are already thinking of the mudslides that could come later, as rain in the winter months soaks the scorched earth. Earlier this year, more than 20 people were killed in mudslides that tore through Montecito. So while the fires burn, analysts in the command center are already figuring out where the highest risks are for devastating debris flows.

“It’s sort of the one-two punch of Mother Nature that gets us every year,” Huston said.