The news is positive in California. Firefighters who have been fighting an “explosive” forest fire since last week that caused the evacuation of thousands of people in the center of this state, announced that they managed to partially contain the disaster.
On Monday morning, the blaze dubbed the “Oak Fire” was only up to 10% contained. 24 hours later, this proportion reached 26%.
This rapid advance was possible thanks to the massive mobilization of nearly 3,000 firefighters and 24 bomber helicopters, as well as a slight improvement in the humidity level, which should increase even more in the coming days.
Unfavorable land?
The forest fire broke out on Friday near the small town of Midpines and covered more than 7,000 hectares, spreading at full speed due in particular to an extremely dry atmosphere and vegetation.
Jonathan Pierce, a spokesman for the fire department, pointed to the role of “high ‘mortality’ of trees in Mariposa County, so there are a lot of dead trees standing, a lot of dead trees that are on the ground” and serving fuel for the flames.
The Oak Fire destroyed about 40 buildings and threatened several thousand homes in small, rural towns in Mariposa County, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Within days, it became California’s biggest wildfire of the season.
The firefighters’ effort could be favored in the coming days by the arrival of the fire in an area already devastated in 2018 by another forest fire.
If you get to this area, “it will slow down a little bit because there will be less fuel there,” explained Jonathan Pierce. “Any vegetation that will have grown back will be much less dense than if nothing had burned.”
Yosemite National Park near the Oak Fire suffered a fire in mid-July, whose flames once threatened giant sequoias. These trees, for a few millennia, have generally been preserved thanks in particular to the controlled fires carried out for decades in these forests to reduce the fuel in the soil.
The American West has experienced forest fires of exceptional magnitude and intensity in recent years, with a marked lengthening of the fire season, a phenomenon that scientists attribute mainly to climate change.
Source: BFM TV
