generalspeaking

Monday, November 12, 2018

California Ablaze

Wildfires burned in California near the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Los Angeles shoreline, engulfing nearly 200,000 acres

"There was really no firefight involved. These firefighters were in the rescue mode all day yesterday."
"I don't even know what to say. It's like we're all walking around kind of in a trance."
"Pretty much the community of Paradise is destroyed. It's that kind of devastation."
Captain Scott McLean, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection

"It was just a wall of fire on each side of us, and we could hardly see the road in front of us."
Mark Bass, police officer

"The particular area is out on a finger of a ridge, where there is a canyon on both sides."
"It’s dense brush, dense trees. It’s one way in, one way out, so it’s very possible that the fire was just so intense that there was no way of avoiding that when trying to leave."
Paradise police chief, Eric Reinbold

"Everything was igniting at once. Swirling winds, swirling embers, fire on both sides of the roads. I lost count how many times I ran over downed power lines.:
"These are signs that the fires we are dealing with are so ferocious."
Scott McLean, deputy chief, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection

Sheriff deputies walk through a neighborhood destroyed by the Camp Fire on November 10, 2018 near Paradise, California. CNN

A wildfire that became a raging beast before anyone living in the retirement community of Paradise even recognized its status as an immediate dire threat still rages out of control. Paradise is no more. Desperate residents, on realizing their direct peril, began driving in streams of traffic away from the fire zone. Meeting so much resistance from the sheer press of traffic that they came to a standstill even while the fire galloped after them. In panic, people left their vehicles and set out on foot for safety. Most reached safe haven.

People fleeing the Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., abandoned their vehicles because of traffic; their cars remained along the road on Sunday. CreditCreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

To date, 31 people are known to have died as a direct result of the fire. Some people have been found burned to death in their cars, some beside their homes, some within the havens their homes once represented to them. The town of 30,000 people was left with no option but to evacuate as speedily as possible, leaving absolutely everything behind but their lives. The loss of life, however, is dreadful. Yet for those finding haven from the fire the very thought that there is nothing to go back to must be staggering.

Raging winds fed a raging fire. A hotter-than-usual summer and a drier-than-hoped-for fall left forests ripe for a volatile potential, an incendiary hot-house, everything tinder-dry and ready to explode. Hillside homes in Southern California burned. There are three distinct wildfires, all of them wreaking havoc. The city of Malibu, home to 13,000 people, ordered evacuated.

Homes Supermarkets, businesses, restaurants, schools, retirement centres, hospitals, destroyed. By the thousands in Paradise north-east of San Francisco.

Evacuation routes surrounded by fires in both Northern and Southern California. Dozens of people are known to be missing apart from those found dead, and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. North of Sacramento the Camp Fire destroyed 6,700 buildings rating it the most destructive inferno the state has ever seen and it has seen many massive and calamitous fires.

Near Los Angeles two fires threaten Malibu. Butte County in Northern California another inferno and there nine people died in the Camp Creek blaze.

"The energy release component, or how much fuel is available for the fire, is at the highest it has been around Redding since at least 1979", wrote The Washington Post's Angela Fritz in July. The Woolsey Fire forced 100,000 people in Thousand Oaks and other areas to abandon their homes after 14,000 hectares were burned.

The official count of 6,453 homes and 260 businesses destroyed in Paradise places it at the top of the pyramid of utter fire-destruction so far.

"It was raining black pieces of soot, coming down like a black snowstorm and starting fires everywhere", recounted Marc Kessler, 55, a science teacher at a Paradise public middle school. "Within minutes, the town was engulfed". When one of his students pointed to what he thought was the moon in the darkened sky as they were being bused out of the town, he said, "That's not the moon. That's the sun. There were times when you couldn't see through the smoke."