Water bomber planes are mobilized to try to control a fire that started on Wednesday and has already affected more than 2,100 hectares of the Los Angeles hinterland. Eight firefighters were briefly hospitalized with minor heat-related injuries, fire officials said.
As in France, in the United States, California is facing, like certain regions of Nevada and Arizona, another day of extreme temperatures. A heat dome settled over the region, pushing the mercury to soar to 43°C on Thursday in the area of the fire. This sweltering weather is expected to continue until next week, with temperature peaks of up to 46°C.
The highway blaze, dubbed “Route Fire,” is “a wake-up call” to the current fire risk, said Los Angeles-area fire department chief Robert Garcia. Current conditions could lead to “very fast” fires with “explosive behavior” before warning that “the next few days are going to be very difficult”.
“Intense heat, low humidity and rough terrain”
Still, the fire of the “Route Fire” which was blocked for a few hours during the main road linking Los Angeles to San Francisco, is partly under control, said the firefighters. “Intense heat, low humidity and rough terrain will complicate the work of firefighters,” authorities said in a situation update. They estimate that this will promote large plumes of smoke, the advance of the fire towards the top of the reliefs and the triggering of other nearby fires.
This heat wave affecting the western United States also caused disruptions on the Californian power grid. Its regulator, California ISO, asks households to limit their consumption from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. in order to avoid saturation.
Among the recommended measures is stopping the recharging of electric vehicles at these times, in a state which announced a few days earlier to ban the sale of new gasoline cars by 2035…
Restrictions lifted on power plants
The reduction in demand that would result from these gestures “can help stabilize the electricity grid during periods of high demand and thus avoid emergency measures that include temporary cuts”, according to California ISO in its warning message.
Indeed, the problem is that in the middle of the day, all the solar panels provide a third of the electricity in California. But, at sunset, the supply of photovoltaic energy is abruptly interrupted, leaving the other sources of electricity to take over, which poses a problem at the start of the evening, when the heat of the day is not yet fallout, pushing demand through air conditioning.
On Wednesday, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom temporarily lifted restrictions so that fossil-fuelled power plants could produce more. The US Weather Service (NWS) has issued an “excessive heat” alert for the majority of California, as well as parts of Arizona and Nevada, warning of “dangerously hot temperatures” for the next few days.
In Southern California, heat waves are not unusual in September, but temperatures above 37°C are considered very hot, even for an area known for its high sunshine. According to scientists, repeated heat waves are an unequivocal marker of global warming and these heat waves are expected to multiply, lengthen and intensify. The American West is hit by more than two decades of devastating drought, made worse by climate change.