California and Oregon Wildfires: Latest Updates

Dry, harsh conditions can spread fires even further.

Firefighters across the West Coast on Monday caused unpredictable low pressure and dry weather, causing new irritation from the forest, burning more than five million acres already, intensifying wildfires already destroying numerous homes and threatening to evacuate at least 24 people.

This season’s devastating wildfires will evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, turning forests, fields and communities into exploding lands, causing dangerous smoke and ash to fall.

For several weeks, state leaders have been urging other states and the federal government to help control a fire and quell their emergency services. President Trump is scheduled to visit McLellan Park in California on Monday. It is mostly there now, Recently burned over 363,000 acres near Sacramento.

While the wind may help disperse some of the smoke from cities such as San Francisco and Auckland, it could also dry out brush and fan flames, warning firefighters not to expect immediate relief as it could alter progress. . Meteorologists said the winds, caused by a slow-moving storm system off the coast of Oregon, would last for most of the week and even bring smoke to Montana, Idaho and Canada.

Climate scientist Philip P., president of the Woodwell Climate Research Center. Duffy says, “Science is basically very simple. “Hot and dry conditions produce dry fuel,” he said. “Easily extinguished fires are now growing very fast and out of control.”

This season has already lost control of many authorities as fires rage on highways, engulfing large “complex” fires, destroying cities and approaching dense suburbs. The city of Paradise, where more than 80 people died in a fire two years ago, is now on the edge of its eastern, northern complex fire, which is one of the largest in the state. To its west is California’s largest: a group known as the August Complex burned more than 877,000 acres as of Sunday.

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Oregon had some bad conditions, however, and more than 30 active fires burned 900,000 acres. The Peachy Creek fire, which burned south of Portland, destroyed nearly 200,000 acres and killed four people. Burned uncontrollably Monday morning.

Although the humidity was relatively low in the early morning, it was hoped that later the moisture would be carried further into the region. “We like a lot of moisture in the air,” said Michael Mead, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento. “Now we don’t have it.”

When President Trump flies to California on Monday, he will assess the state’s outrage Wildfire, He will face the dire consequences of a reality he stubbornly refuses to accept: the catastrophic effects of global warming.

To the global scientific community, acres of burnt earth and The sky filled with ashes The tragic, but predictable, acceleration of climate change across the American West. Almost two years ago, Federal scientists decided Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels could triple the frequency of severe fires in the western states.

But the president used his time in the country’s highest office to actively promote the burning of fossil fuels. Pushing back or weakening every major federal policy Aimed at combating dangerous emissions. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his senior environmental officials continue to ridicule, deny, or downplay the established science of man-made climate change.

Now, as he fights for the second time at the White House, Mr. Trump has doubled his anti-climate agenda as a way to attract his main supporters. At a rally in Pennsylvania last month, he accused California Leaf of failing to “clean up your bases” and threatened to “pay for it because they didn’t listen to us.”

Like the corona virus that has ravaged the country for months – a dangerous fire spreading across the West is a warning to the president that he and his administration may be held accountable by many voters for failing to mobilize government effectively to exclude scientists and reduce nature. Disasters that killed lives, damaged property and threatened economic prosperity.

“If you think climate change is not real, talk to a firefighter,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric M. Corsetti, former Vice President Joseph R. Supporter of Biden Jr., Mr. Trump’s anti – Democrat, CNN’s “Government Sunday.”

Mr. Trump’s climate record is far more aggressive than the lycee-fire environmental policy that has been promoted for years by business interests in his party. In fact, he eagerly sought to withdraw the terms, even the largest in the world Oil companies And Automakers opposed the moves, Claiming that they will lead to years of legal uncertainty and that they are actually harming their grassroots.

Most of the burns in the west are in remote forests, but in Oregon, entire communities along the north-south intermediate highway I-5 on the west coast have been demolished.

“We have nothing close to this,” said Margot Cooper, who has lived in Sio, Ore, an agricultural and registration town southeast of the state capital Salem for the past three decades. “This is the first time we’ve been in our backyard.”

A 13-year-old boy was killed last week in a nearby valley. When he tried to take his grandmother to safety.

Nearby Gates, Ore., Refugees from the fire lived in dinghy motels or cars for five days, eating pizzas donated for dinner and exhausted without knowing if their homes were burned or standing.

Police cruisers blocked traffic on the highway to the hills east of Salem, where the Peachy Creek fire is still out of control. Some families were able to pass. Other troops of pickup trucks entered the side roads and avoided the edges of the farm fields in search of alternatives. Some were looking for needed medication, while others lost pets and signs of breakage.

“Everything is still on fire,” said Mike Alexander, 29, who had been coming in since the first wildfire awoke in the mountains behind his home last Monday night.

Some evacuation warnings were eased Sunday in areas south of Portland. But many cities were inaccessible. Law enforcement officials set up a hotline Sunday for those in the burned Lakeside resort cities of Detroit and neighboring Idanha.

Firefighters are heading to the mountains in Amesville, a small town outside Salem, to help other firefighters try to catch up with the 188,000-acre Peachy Creek fire. Firefighters were running over the adrenaline, sleeping in the donated trailer, which was dropped off in their parking lot and then headed back into the fire.

Fire precautions for prisoners may make them vulnerable to infection.

As wildfires engulfed Oregon this week, prisoners were rushed from occupying flames – not for freedom, but to a crowded state prison, where they slept shoulder to shoulder in cots, sometimes on the ground. Food was scarce, showers and toilets were few, and fights erupted between rival gang members.

Safe from one disaster, but given to another: the corona virus infection, which has spread at a dangerous rate in US prisons.

“From what we know about Govt-19, how quickly it can spread, how dangerous it is, we need to be prepared for the worst,” said Bobin Singh, managing director of the Oregon Judicial Resource Center, a prisoners’ advocacy organization.

It has never been easier, and incarceration has never been a more traumatic experience than it is today, especially on the West Coast, where prisoners are more vulnerable than ever to a historic wildfire season that has been exacerbated by the double crisis of epidemics and climate change. Virus outbreaks have spread through cellboxes – the Oregon State Prison system has had 1,600 infections in the past three months – and poor ventilation systems have smoked from the outside.

Before the fire started, the virus had spread to prisons in the United States because authorities routinely carried out routine transfers without testing prisoners for the corona virus and isolating victims. Now the fires have forced Oregon authorities to move prisoners so quickly that prisoners and prosecutors are worried about not taking precautions against the virus, which is only a matter of time before people get sick.

“Right now, this situation is something that awaits you no matter which way you turn,” said Rashid Stanley-Lockhart, who was released from prison in California in January after serving 18 years for armed robbery, now working for planting justice, a non-profit in Auckland that helps newly released prisoners. . “Back here, Govit is here. Back here, there is fire. You come back here, and overall there is imprisonment. “

Jerry Brown on a California exit: ‘Where are you going?’

Former California Governor Jerry Brown was unable to build mountains far from his farm in Williams on Sunday. Every few minutes, he picked up his phone to check the latest air quality reading. “Unhealthy,” he said.

He has served in state government and politics for more than 45 years. Brown has been warning about this day for years. But he said by phone from his farm that he never expected this moment to come so soon. An hour’s drive north of Sacramento he never thought it would be covered by the wind around his house he built in the desert of his family farm.

But still, with all the fire and smoke, Mr. Brown presented himself as the state’s strongest ambassador who has long been associated with the Brown family name. Announcing he was not going anywhere, he dismissed the latest round of talks about people fleeing California.

“We’ll get out of here – we ‘re going somewhere else,” you might say, “Mr. Brown, 82, said.” No. Problems are going to be everywhere in the United States. This is the new nature. It is predicted, it happens. It is part of a new long-term experience. ”

“Tell me: Where are you going?” Mr. Brown continued. “What is your alternative? May be Canada. Are you going to go to places like Iowa where hurricane intensifies? The truth is, we have a growing global crisis, scientists say. Often, this is ignored. Now we have a graphic example. “

Reporting contributed Tim Arango, Nicholas Bogal-Burrows, Coral Davenport, Thomas Fuller, Christine Hauser, Jack Healy, Adam Nagarni, Jack Nicos, Michael D. Shear And Alan Yuhas.