Firefighters make headway against giant California fire
Absence of other major blazes in area allows them to focus efforts on massive wildfire
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MARIPOSA (California) • Firefighters have finally started to bring California's largest wildfire so far this year under control, halting its eastward expansion towards nearby Yosemite National Park, though thousands of people remained under evacuation orders.
The Oak Fire had expanded rapidly after it began last Friday, overwhelming the initial deployment of firefighters, as extremely hot and dry weather fuelled its galloping pace through dry forest and underbrush.
But Monday was "a successful day for aircraft and firefighters" as helicopters dropped 1.4 million litres of water on the fire, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) said in a Monday night update.
"Fire crews are working aggressively using bulldozers, hand crews and aircraft," Cal Fire said in an updated status report.
The fire had grown to 6,977ha by Monday night, about a 3 per cent increase from Monday morning, Cal Fire said, more than half the size of San Francisco.
It was 16 per cent contained, up from 10 per cent contained on Monday morning, and 3,700 people had been evacuated.
The report contrasted with comments on Sunday from several Cal Fire officials who said the fire initially behaved unlike any other they had seen and defied their best efforts at containment, with burning embers sparking smaller fires up to 3.2km in front of the main conflagration.
The absence of other major fires in the region enabled Cal Fire to concentrate 2,500 firefighters on the blaze, and the lack of wind allowed for the continuous use of aircraft to drop water and fire retardant, officials said.
"It was a perfect storm of a good kind," said Cal Fire spokesman Hector Vasquez at the command post in Mariposa, California, about 240km inland from San Francisco.
The northward direction of the fire was taking it into the Sierra National Forest but no longer in the direction of Yosemite, some 16km away. A grove of Yosemite's giant, ancient sequoia trees did come under threat from another wildfire weeks ago.
Temperatures in the area soared to 36 deg C, while scant chances for thunderstorms faded.
The National Weather Service forecast 37.7 deg C weather for much of the week.
More than two decades of drought and rising temperatures have conspired to make California more vulnerable than ever to wildfires, with the two most devastating years on record coming in 2020 and last year, when more than 2.75 million ha burned, an area greater than the size of Rwanda.
REUTERS, BLOOMBERG
