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Last year, the wards of the Northern California wine city, Santa Rosa, and the coastal town of Ventura, Southern California, were devastated.
The warmer weather attributed to climate change is the drying of vegetation, creating more intense fires that spread rapidly from rural areas to city subdivisions, according to climate and fire experts. But they also blame municipalities that develop housing in previously undeveloped areas.
"There are only places where there should be no subdivisions," said Kurt Henke, a former fire chief in Sacramento. . "We are not talking about a single family who wants to build a house in the forest, I'm talking about subdivisions that invade the urban interface of the wild lands that put them in the path of these destructive fires."
Henke wants more funds from the state legislature to deploy firefighters to areas where conditions are conducive to rapid fires, so that they can react quickly if a fire breaks out.
The fire that affected Redding – a city of about 92,000 inhabitants within 250 miles (400 kilometers) north of San Francisco – began Monday about 10 miles (16 kilometers) west of Toronto. West of the city before crossing the historic town of the Shasta Gold Rush and surrounding area on Thursday. Keswick He then jumped the Sacramento River and drew subdivisions on the western edge of Redding.
Redding is located at the northern end of the Central Agricultural Valley, surrounded by a picturesque landscape. It has a center with a theater and a wine bar and houses divided into subdivisions.
Two firefighters were killed: one from the Redding Fire Department and the other a bulldozer operator hired for the fire. Hundreds of houses were destroyed and nearly 40 thousand people were under evacuation orders.
As the fires of Santa Rosa and Ventura last year, the wind was one of the main contributors to the spread of fire.
"He tears the trees off the ground and throws them into the houses," CalFire spokesman Chad Carroll said on Friday. "It's pretty strange and unusual."
Calfire director Ken Pimlott described the fire activity at a press conference Friday as a "tornado".
"What we see is not only in Shasta County, but literally across the state, fires increase exponentially."
Visiting Ventura County Neighborhoods Devastated by fire last year, Governor Jerry Brown said that drought and climate change mean that California is facing a "new reality" where lives and property are continually threatened by fire. [19659002] The state is experiencing longer periods of warm temperatures and droughts that make possible major fires throughout the year, said Daniel Swain, a climatologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. Angeles.
"What we see with some of the more dangerous fires is that they spread quickly, that they burn a lot or that they produce their own climate," he said.
Yet he is d & # 39; agree with other experts who say that the destruction is also the result of "Over the years, we put more people in danger," he said. "More people living in high-risk areas than usual."
The Santa Rosa fire in October 2017 destroyed nearly 2,700 homes, even in a neighborhood with new and expensive hillside subdivisions. limit of the city. The Ventura fire two months later destroyed more than 500 buildings.
Jacque Chase, an urban planning expert at California State University in Chico, said that US government statistics show that there are more houses throughout the country. in areas bordering urban areas and undeveloped lands. This increases the risk of fires caused by human activity. It also means that firefighters need to change their approach.
"They must be busy saving lives and saving property," he said.
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