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California’s ‘Extreme’ Oak Fire in Mariposa County Is Now State’s Biggest of the Year


The first signs of progress in battling the Oak fire raging just outside California’s Yosemite Park arrived Monday, with the state’s main fire agency reporting the blaze has now been cleared. 10% control.

But that hasn’t allayed the worries of those in Mariposa County, where the fire has ravaged 17,000 acres. Emmanuel Chavez, a spokesman for Cal Fire, told The Daily Beast that the fire’s behavior remained “erratic”, along with his colleagues struggling to evacuate thousands of people as the blaze turned deadly. the state’s biggest fire of the year in less than three days.

Chavez said the homes of more than 3,000 people were under immediate threat. More than 2,000 firefighters were sent to battle the blaze, but they had already robbed seven or eight homes, he said.

Lynda Reynolds-Brown and her husband, Aubrey, evacuated Friday to a nearby elementary school, saying the fire came down quickly. When they talk to KCRA-TV Sunday, they are still uncertain about the fate of their home.

“It was scary when we left because we got the ashes but we had a picture of the roll,” Lynda said. “Looks like it’s above our house and gets to our street very quickly.”

Aubrey added: “We started packing each other up and that’s when I went back up the hill and looked and I was like ‘oh my god’.

The official cause of the fire has yet to be released, but Chavez said the likely culprit is a combination of high winds, dry vegetation and scorching temperatures at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, conditions growing in popularity in California due to climate change. .

In addition to thousands of homes, the Oak fire appears to have posed a short-term threat to Mariposa Grove’s beloved giant mascots — some of which are a thousand years old — if it continues to spread at a rapid rate.

“We’re trying to preserve Mariposa Grove because it’s a beautiful part of our forest,” Chavez said Monday.

However, the Sequoias, which became the first federally protected natural area by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, is no longer an impending Cal Fire worry, as the fire’s spread has slowed. .

A highway leading to Yosemite remained closed Monday. While the Oak fire remains just outside the park, Yosemite itself is still recovering from the Washburn fire that broke out earlier this month and was previously the state’s biggest fire of the year. According to Chavez, the Washburn fire has almost been extinguished and is no longer considered a threat.

Jonathan Pierce, another Cal Fire spokesman, on Monday said the Oak fires have “extreme behavior” in part because violent outbreaks in the area in recent years have left the land vulnerable to more damage.

While devastating, Pierce pointed out that the Oak Fire isn’t nearly as large as the recent wildfires to ravage California. By this time last year, the Dixie Fire had raged a total of more than one million acres — more than 60 times the area that the Oak Fire had consumed.

The authenticity of last year’s fire prompted mass resignations from Cal Fire. The agency is said to be still fighting more firefighters before this year’s fire season—Which is forecast to be especially devastating as the state enters the second year of a devastating drought.

Pierce confirmed there were no reports of deaths from the Oak fire. However, he said firefighters had a long way to go before they could label the blaze under control.

“We threw a lot more resources at the fire and that helped,” Pierce said. “Those teams have done a lot of hard work but there’s still a lot of work ahead of them.”



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