A wall of flames from the Caldor Fire roared over Echo Summit at Highway 50 Monday evening, racing down the mountainside toward the Lake Tahoe Basin where thousands of residents were forced to flee their homes in a mass exodus that clogged the few routes out of the region.
The Lake Tahoe area is a recreational paradise for millions of Americans, offering beaches, water sports, hiking, ski resorts, and golfing. South Lake Tahoe, at the lake’s southern end, bustles with outdoor activities, with casinos available in bordering Stateline, Nevada.
However, the city of South Lake Tahoe – population about 22,000 people – has been evacuated as of Tuesday morning. A 40-mile stretch on Highway 50 remains closed in both directions from Sly Park Road in Pollock Pines to Meyers.
Officials at a Monday evening briefing said the city has been preparing in event of evacuations ever since the Angora Fire in 2007 that destroyed hundreds of homes.
The Caldor Fire, which started August 14, has now burned at least 186,568 acres, or 276 square miles, and containment has dropped from 19 to 15 percent, as of Monday evening, Cal Fire said.
The Mercury News says the fire, the biggest in the area in at least a century, is a “nightmare scenario that firefighters have worried about for years.” Spot fires from embers that blow over the ridge would be burning forested areas that haven’t burned in generations.
Fire scientists are saying it is particularly alarming that for the first time ever, two fires, the Dixie Fire and the Caldor Fire have spanned the Sierra Nevada mountain range from east to west.
“We haven’t had fires burn from one side of the Sierra to the other,” the head of Cal Fire says, per the Tahoe Daily Tribune. “We did with Dixie, and now we do with the Caldor—we need to be cognizant that there is fire activity happening (here) that we have never seen before.”
The wildfire threat has grown in California to the point that the U.S. Forest Service announced Monday that all national forests in California would be closed until Sept. 17, according to the Associated Press.
Climate change has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive, scientists say.
