Enlarge image
A firefighter fighting the
Fairview fire
: "Explosive fire behavior"
Photo: Ethan Swope/AP
Recent drama is in Hemet, an hour and a half southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
Videos and images shared via Twitter show homes and cars ablaze, other buildings in the Riverside County town threateningly close, with desperate residents hoping to be spared.
As the fire eats into Avery Canyon on Monday, Jeremy Fields and his wife, Gladys Nicomedez, gather some clothing, medicine, and insurance papers and flee the blazing hell by taking the only passable road.
"If we hadn't left the second we did," Fields recalled in the Los Angeles Times, "we would have been trapped."
Just like his neighbors - they didn't make it.
In the evening, just a few hours after the outbreak of the so-called
Fairview fire
, the local authorities report: Two people are dead. The fire has now spread to more than 20 square kilometers on the south-eastern edge of Hemet, thousands of people have had to evacuate their homes as a precaution, hundreds of firefighters try to contain the fire, also with the help of several fire-fighting planes and helicopters.
So far the success has been manageable.
Two deadly fires over the long weekend
The
Fairview fire
wasn't the only deadly fire in California over the
Labor Day
long weekend.
It was only on Sunday that there was bad news from the far north of the state.
In Siskiyou County, flames devastated a historic neighborhood in the town of Weed, killing two people.
The fire, which apparently broke out in an old, disused sawmill, is said to have spread so explosively that an orderly evacuation was hardly possible.
According to the California Forest and Fire Protection Agency (Cal Fire) , the
mill fire
has now burned about 16 square kilometers of land.
The sparsely populated county of Siskiyou on the border with the state of Oregon will be hit particularly hard by wildfires in 2022, as in previous years.
In the vicinity of the
Mill Fire
, the fire brigade has been fighting the
mountain fire
for several days in an area of almost 50 square kilometers .
The Yeti fire
that broke out in July after a lightning strike
has been almost completely extinguished .
And the worst forest and bush fire of the year in California so far raged in Siskiyou County:
four people died in the so-called
McKinney fire
, and
the small town of Klamath River was almost completely destroyed.
Despite all the horror reports: So far, California has gotten off relatively lightly in the 2022 fire season.
The "Los Angeles Times" currently counts 20 larger and smaller fires throughout the state.
The continuously updated statistics from Cal Fire are also not very reassuring: According to this, at least nine people died in more than 6,000 fires in a total area of around 1,000 square kilometers - that's larger than Berlin.
However, by California standards, these numbers can almost be described as normal, as they are well behind those from the past, sometimes catastrophic, fire years.
Historic heat wave
According to official information, around 10,500 square kilometers of land burned in the west coast state in 2021, the year before it was even 17,400 square kilometers, an area larger than Thuringia.
Although there was less scorched earth in 2018, the fires were more deadly and destructive than ever before: 100 people died and more than 24,000 buildings were destroyed, according to Cal Fire.
The year before, there were 47 fatalities.
California is still a long way from such horror figures.
The worries were great.
The mega drought continues to dry out the forests and soils, the spring was already drier than it has been for decades, and there is almost no rain in the summer anyway.
And now the most populous state in the USA is also groaning under an extreme heat wave that has caused temperatures to rise well above 40 degrees in many regions.
Southern California in particular is used to high temperatures in summer, but experts emphasize that the heat waves are occurring more frequently, are more intense and last longer due to climate change.
The heat bell that has been hanging over California for days is already considered historic.
Even on the coast, where there is always a pleasant breeze, it is brutally hot. People are called upon to save energy to prevent power outages, and in many regions there are strict restrictions on watering your own garden.
Given these conditions, it is more of a stroke of luck that the fire season has been moderate so far.
Above all, there is no reason to breathe easy now.
The heat wave massively increases the risk of fire, a spark can trigger a catastrophe.
The vegetation dries out like in an oven and becomes even more combustible, explained the climate scientist Daniel Swain from the University of California in Los Angeles.
His colleague John Abatzoglou from Merced also warned in the "San Francisco Chronicle": "If it starts to burn anywhere, it could result in a large forest fire that will be difficult to contain."
The firefighters know what the experts are talking about.
After the rapid spread of a – now mostly extinguished – fire on Highway 5 northwest of Los Angeles, Robert Garcia, the fire chief responsible for the forests around LA, spoke of a “wake-up call for us all”.
The coming days would be a challenge, if there was a fire, one would have to reckon with "very rapid fire growth and very, very explosive fire behavior".
Scientists and fire brigades are also concerned about the weather forecast.
On the one hand, the winds usually freshen up as autumn approaches, and they can quickly fan fires that break out.
Second, spurs from Hurricane Kay, which is making its way toward Mexico's Pacific coast, could sweep across California over the weekend and early next week -- but that doesn't necessarily mean there will be plenty of rain.
Climate scientist Swain fears so-called dry thunderstorms, especially over the center and north of the state, because of the dry air masses: The precipitation evaporates before it reaches the ground.
There are still lightnings - and they can set the bone-dry vegetation on fire.
"Combined with the unprecedented heat wave we're experiencing right now, and just before the fall wind season, that would be a nightmare," the San Francisco Chronicle quotes Swain as saying.
Two years ago in August, lightning had sparked several large fires in Northern California.
The emergency services hope that the worst fears will not come true.
The prospect of more wind in the record heat is enough for them.
"If this heat continues and we get northerly winds, we're going to see big fires soon," Rich Sampson of Cal Fire's San Mateo and Santa Cruz unit told the Chronicle.
"It's only the beginning of September... the next few months are going to be tough."