Millions of acres of national forest in Northern California are being closed because of dangerous fire conditions that already have sent a score of blazes raging through the area and destroyed hundreds of homes.
On Thursday, the U.S. Forest Service announced that beginning on August 22, it will close nine national forests from near Lake Tahoe at the Nevada border on the east all the way west to Six Rivers National Forest, which stretches north to the Oregon border and contains more than 1 million acres of land alone.
The list of National Forests includes:
- Tahoe National Forest
- Modoc National Forest
- Klamath National Forest
- Plumas National Forest
- Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit
- Shasta-Trinity National Forest
- Lassen National Forest
- Six Rivers National Forest
- Mendocino National Forest
The El Dorado National forest is already closed because of the Caldor Fire, which incinerated the Sierra Nevada town of Grizzly Flats this week. As of Friday morning, the Caldor Fire has grown to 73,415 acres in size and is 0 percent contained. It has destroyed 104 structures and is threatening 6,905 homes. Some 25,000 people remained under evacuation orders.
The Dixie Fire, burning since July 13 in the northern Sierra Nevada and the southern Cascades, continues to spread and prompt more evacuations as it burns across Plumas, Butte, Tehama, and Lassen counties, reports FOX News.
The fire is only 35 percent contained, according to authorities, and as of Friday morning has burned 700,630 acres, over 1,094 square miles. Over 16,000 structures are still threatened by the Dixie Fire, Cal Fire reported. At least 1,225 structures have been destroyed, including 652 homes. Eighty-nine structures have been damaged.
“The Dixie Fire is the first fire that we’re aware of that has burned from the west side of the mountain range all the way over into the valley floor on the east side of the mountain range,” Cal Fire Chief Thom Porter said Wednesday at a CalOES briefing. “We don’t have any record of that happening before.”
There are over 100 large, active fires were burning in more than a dozen Western states, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.
