California Wildfire Races Through a Forest Community, in a Haunting Reminder
The New York Times
The Park fire in Northern California quickly became the state’s largest and most destructive wildfire this year, not far from where Paradise, Calif., was decimated in 2018.
Ryan Kendall’s crew of firefighters arrived too late to save the house on Dear Abby Road.
All that was left on Friday, amid the thick forests that surrounded it, was a jumble of smoking household appliances licked by hissing flames. The plastic from the home’s giant water storage tanks was fully ignited and dripping fire onto the forest floor.
“People love to build their homes in the forest,” said Mr. Kendall, the captain of a team of firefighters that drove up from Los Angeles to help battle the Park fire, by far the largest of the year in California in what is shaping up to be a treacherous fire season.
Dear Abby Road is in a neighborhood, Forest Ranch, that is hauntingly similar to the community that was decimated six years ago in the town of Paradise. As the crow flies, Forest Ranch is just 10 miles and a few gullies away, built into the evergreen forest on steep hillsides.
In Paradise, the fire came suddenly, whipped by a fierce wind, incinerating the town and killing 85 people, becoming a national symbol of the vulnerability of people living in wildland areas in the age of climate change.
The fire that blew through Forest Ranch came at a relentless pace. After igniting on Wednesday, the fire exploded to 120,000 acres in a single day, sending up a towering mountain of smoke, a pyrocumulus plume as firefighters call it, that hung like a nuclear cloud above the Sacramento Valley. By Friday morning, the fire had grown to 164,000 acres and was only 3 percent contained.
