The conditions in the area around Redding, California, were ripe for disaster on July 26. The Carr fire was already raging into its fourth day, and the temperature soared above 110 degrees Fahrenheit . The humidity dipped to just 7 percent, and after two months with no rain, everything was bone dry.
As evening set in, the wind kicked up. The fire exploded.
In less than two hours, two firefighters were dead. Don Smith, an 81-year-old bulldozer operator, was killed after rapidly moving flames overtook him in his machine. Jeremy Stoke, a 37-year-old fire inspector with the Redding Fire Department, was helping evacuate area residents when a massive, powerful fire tornado trapped and killed him. Five other firefighters suffered burns or other serious injuries.
An August California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection report detailed the extraordinary fire weather conditions that led to the tragic incident. The swirling fire plume generated wind speeds as high as 165 miles per hour, triggering the flames to move in unpredictable and unusual ways that surprised many highly experienced firefighters, the agency wrote.
The report stressed that the wildland firefighting environment is becoming more extreme due to a combination of a changing climate, overly dense and dry fuels, changing weather patterns, and continued growth of communities into fire prone landscapes.
California has always had a fire season, but smoke and flame have now become a near year-round ordeal . Gov. Jerry Brown famously declared last year that devastating wildfires are the Golden States new normal . But its still far from normal for the people on the frontlines of those fires, who say the changes have been sudden and startling. Fires are larger and more destructive, burn faster and behave in more erratic and unpredictable ways. And fires often continue to rage at night, a time when cooler temperatures historically provided an opportunity for crews to make progress. What was previously considered a career fire a large-scale event that a firefighter might expect to see only once in several decades on the job have become almost an annual event.
This spike in activity has stretched firefighting resources thin and brought increased health and safety risks to an inherently dangerous job.
We are not first responders anymore, Michael Mohler, deputy director of Cal Fire, told HuffPost. We are extended responders.
David Albright, a 43-year-old battalion chief at the Chula Vista Fire Department, remembers when a 4,000-acre fire was considered big. It was once unheard of for a blaze to take out 20,000 acres in a single day, he said. There were years when the Chula Vista Fire Department was not called in on a single fire outside their home county of San Diego.
The situation has drastically changed over his 25 years on the job. California now faces multiple megafires those larger than 100,000 acres every year. He now spends much of the summer in northern California, battling large infernos before returning to the southern part of the state to fight fall fires.
In late June, Albright found himself back in fire-ravaged Lake County, an area hes come to know well in the last few years as the county has experienced several devastating blazes. He was the leader of a strike team of more than 20 firefighters called in to fight the Pawnee fire, which erupted June 23 near the community of Spring Valley, north of Santa Rosa. After days of violent activity, a break in the weather allowed crews to finally get a handle on what was then the states largest fire of 2018 .
On a Wednesday afternoon, Albrights team roamed a blackened hillside above the valley, dressed in yellow protective suits and armed with shovels and adze hoes. As the sun beat down and temperatures reached into the 90s, they searched for still-smoldering embers and dug trenches meant to prevent any additional flare-ups from spreading. Driveways along the road below led to the burned-out skeletons of cars and the twisted remains of peoples homes.
Firefighters battling the Pawnee fire noted how unusual it was to see a wind-driven blaze of that magnitude so early in the summer, taking it as a troubling sign that California was in for another busy, and likely deadly, fire season.
Where are we going to be in July and August? Albright wondered, standing among freshly charred trees and brush.
He didnt know it then, but by August, Albright would be back in Lake County, several miles from where he was standing, fighting the largest wildfire in the states recorded history . He was one of the approximately 4,000 personnel dispatched to fight the Mendocino Complex fire, which started July 27 and ultimately torched an astonishing 460,000 acres an area more than 10 times the size of the District of Columbia. Several homes in Spring Valley that firefighters managed to save from the Pawnee fire in June were lost, according to Albright.
California, he said, is just in a bad way right now.
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