The Dixie fire, the second largest in California’s recorded history, slammed into one of the largest urban targets in its path Tuesday morning: the city of Susanville, home to 15,000.
The former logging and mining town is the seat of Lassen County and one of several places in the Sierra Nevada Mountains foothills where authorities issued evacuation orders or warnings on Monday. Officials in Northern California expect the fire hazard to remain exceptionally high for the next few days amid high winds, low humidity and triple-digit temperatures.
One of the places evacuated Monday night was the area in and around Janesville, about 20 miles southeast of Susanville. Journalists posted photos and videos showing flames in the night sky several miles from Janesville.
Monday afternoon gusts of up to 30 miles per hour pushed the fire within a few miles of Susanville, The Associated Press reported Monday. The city’s police asked residents to be ready to evacuate.
“Fire behavior is unpredictable and we just don’t know how it will progress,” the Lassen County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post Monday night.
The Dixie fire is one of at least six major fires in Northern California. It started more than a month ago and has so far set fire to an area about three-quarters the size of Rhode Island. By Monday, it had spread to more than 600,000 acres in four counties, according to a NewsMadura wildfire tracker.
But the fire was only 31 percent under control — the same as 24 hours earlier.
“Unfortunately, there was a lot of fire activity today for our resources and the people who live here,” Jake Cagle, an officer with the California Interagency Incident Management Team, said in a briefing Monday night, referring to an area west of Susanville. He said high winds in the area were expected to ease around midnight, but “critical firefighting” would continue until Tuesday.
In the west, the McFarland fire had burned 69,000 acres Monday night and was 51 percent under control, according to the Times wildfire tracker. The Shasta County Sheriff’s Office on Monday issued a mandatory evacuation order for Platinum Township, a community of about 200 people north of Mendocino National Forest that is threatened by the fire.
And the fire at the Monument, further northwest, “challenged firefighters with significant fire activity” on Monday, forest officials from the Shasta-Trinity National Forest said in a statement. That fire had burned 102,883 acres and was contained only 10 percent.
Pacific Gas & Electric, the California utility company, has said it may need to cut power to 48,000 customers in 18 of the state’s counties, including in the Sierra Nevada foothills, on Tuesday evening to prevent power lines from causing wildfires.
The cause of the Dixie fire is still under investigation. In July, PG&E said blown fuses on one of the utility poles could be the cause.
The Dixie fire is one of about 100 wildfires in the West that have forced the US Forest Service to deploy about 21,000 federal firefighters this summer in states parched by drought and scorching temperatures, more than double the number that was deployed around this time a year ago.
The increase in fires has continued this week, even as the Bootleg fire, which had destroyed more than 400,000 acres in southern Oregon since early July, was completely brought under control over the weekend.
While wildfires occur across the West every year, scientists see the impact of climate change in the extreme heatwaves that contributed to the intensity of the fires this summer. Prolonged periods of abnormally high temperatures signal a changing climate, they say.
