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GREENVILLE, Calif. (AP) – After four years of homelessness, Kesia Studebaker thought she had finally landed on her feet when she found a kitchen job at a restaurant and moved into a house in the small community of Greenville .
She had been a tenant for three months and hoped the stability would help her regain custody of her 14-year-old daughter. But in just one night, a raging forest fire ravaged the mountain town and “took everything away,” she said.
Fueled by strong winds and dry vegetation, the Dixie Fire became the largest wildland fire in state history. Residents of northern California’s scenic forests face a weekend of fear as it threatens to burn down thousands of homes.
“We knew we didn’t have enough rain and fires could happen, but we didn’t expect a monster like this,” Studebaker said on Saturday.
The blaze incinerated much of Greenville on Wednesday and Thursday, destroying 370 homes and structures and threatening nearly 14,000 buildings in the northern Sierra Nevada. It had engulfed an area larger than the size of New York City.
The Dixie fire, named after the road it started, spanned an area of 1,813 square kilometers (700 square miles) on Saturday night and was only 21 percent contained, according to the California Department of forests and fire protection.
Four firefighters were taken to hospital on Friday after being struck by a fallen branch. More than 20 people were initially reported missing, but on Saturday afternoon authorities contacted all but four of them.
The cause of the fire was under investigation. The Pacific Gas & Electric utility said it could have been triggered when a tree fell on one of its power lines. A federal judge on Friday ordered PG&E to give details by Aug. 16 on the equipment and vegetation where the fire started.
Cooler nighttime temperatures and higher humidity slowed the spread of the fire, and temperatures topped 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) instead of the triple-digit highs recorded earlier in the week.
But the blaze and its neighboring fires, several hundred kilometers apart, posed a continuing threat.
Studebaker sought refuge in an evacuation center before setting up his tent in a friend’s yard.
She intends to return to work if the restaurant where she works remains open. Her boss also evacuated when the town of Chester, northwest of Greenville, lost power and the smoke was so thick it was difficult to breathe.
Heat waves and the historic drought associated with climate change have made wildfires more difficult to fight in the American West. Scientists said climate change has made the region much hotter and drier over the past 30 years and will continue to make weather conditions more extreme and forest fires more frequent and destructive.
Near the Klamath National Forest, firefighters closely monitored small communities that were ordered to be evacuated on the way to the antelope blaze, which had previously launched flames 30 meters high in blackening grass, brush and dry wood. It was only 20% content.
Further northwest, around 500 homes scattered in and around Shasta-Trinity National Forest remained threatened by the monument fire and others by the McFarland fire, both sparked by thunderstorms last week fire officials said.
About a two-hour drive south of the Dixie blaze, crews had surrounded nearly half of the river blaze that broke out near the town of Colfax on Wednesday and destroyed 68 homes and other buildings . Evacuation orders for thousands of people in Nevada and Placer counties were lifted on Friday. Three people, including a firefighter, were injured, authorities said.
Smoke from the fires blanketed northern California and western Nevada, causing air quality to deteriorate to very unhealthy and, at times, dangerous levels.
Air quality advisories have spread across California’s San Joaquin Valley and across the San Francisco Bay Area to Denver, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, where residents have been invited to keep their windows and doors closed. The air quality in Denver ranked among the worst in the world on Saturday afternoon.
California’s fire season is on track to overtake last year’s season, which was the worst fire season in recent state history.
So far this year, more than 6,000 fires have destroyed more than 1,260 square miles (3,260 square kilometers) of land – more than triple the losses for the same period in 2020, according to state figures on fires.
The wildfires raging in California were among 107 large fires that have burned in 14 states, mostly in the West, where historic drought conditions have left the land parched and ready to be kindled.
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Nguyen reported from Oakland, California. Associated Press editors Adam Beam in Sacramento, Terry Chea in Colfax, Calif., Christopher Weber and Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles, and Jocelyn Gecker in San Francisco contributed to this report.
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This version corrects that on Saturday afternoon, the authorities had contacted all the people, except four, initially missing, and not five.
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