Massive fire continues to spread in California
The fire dubbed “Oak fire” is ravaging near Yosemite National Park in California and thousands of people had to evacuate on Sunday.
Favored by “extreme drought”, winds and rising temperatures, the fire burned at least 5,500 hectares of forest.
Getty Images via AFP
A violent fire that has ravaged the Californian forest since Friday continued to spread on Sunday, causing the evacuation of thousands of people, in the context of strong heat peaks affecting tens of millions of Americans throughout the United States.
The fire, dubbed the “Oak Fire,” sprawls across Mariposa County, near Yosemite National Park and its famous giant sequoias. It “has expanded significantly in the northern portion, moving further into the Sierra National Forest,” according to a Sunday bulletin from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Favored by “extreme drought”, winds and rising temperatures, the fire, fought by some 2,000 firefighters, burned at least 5,500 hectares of forest, destroyed 10 properties, damaged five others and threatened more than 2,500 , a spokeswoman for the department told AFP.
“Scary”
More than 6,000 people, mostly living in small high-altitude communities, had to evacuate on Saturday, according to another California fire department spokesperson, quoted by the Los Angeles Times newspaper.
“It was scary when we left, because we were getting ashes on us and we had such a vision of this cloud (of smoke). It looked like it was over our house and coming towards us very quickly,” Lynda Reynolds-Brown, a woman who had to leave her home, told local television channel KCRA 3.
“We were starting to gather our things. I went back up the hill to look and I thought ”Oh my God”, it (the fire) was coming quickly, ”added her husband, Aubrey Brown, near a school in Mariposa transformed into a center of emergency reception.
Yosemite Park, one of the most famous in the world, had experienced a fire in mid-July, the flames of which threatened its giant sequoias. The American West has already experienced forest fires of exceptional magnitude and intensity in recent years, with a very marked lengthening of the fire season, a phenomenon that scientists attribute to climate change.
Between 37°C and 43°C
“Oak Fire” is one of the most dramatic manifestations of the heat wave that hit the United States this weekend, in the northwest, center and northeast. According to a map from the National Weather Service (NWS), a very large part of the country, including California, all of the south, and then much of the east coast, experienced temperatures of 37°C to 43°C.
Scorching heat expected to ease somewhat on Monday: It will “continue to rage across the central and northeast this (Sunday) evening, before the upper trough over Canada descends into the region to moderate a little bit the temperatures tomorrow” (Monday), according to the NWS forecast.
But not all regions will benefit: Temperatures of 37°C or more are forecast for the next few days in parts of eastern Kansas and Oklahoma, south to Missouri and north to Arkansas. Even the usually cool Pacific Northwest won’t escape the heat, with high temperatures “expected to rise steadily over the next few days and might set record highs,” the NWS adds.
AFP
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