Lightning-Sparked Brush Fires Push Crews to Edge

Overwhelmed firefighting forces battled more than 400 lightning-sparked blazes Monday throughout Northern California. One wildfire roared across lines, sending 18 firefighters to the hospital and destroying three fire trucks.

Maryn Pitt, an assistant director of the California Department of Forestry, said at least 435 fires, ignited by at least 2,626 lightning strikes in 11 hours on Sunday, had burned a total of about 6,700 acres by Monday, with more lightning and winds expected.

Officials at the Forestry Department’s Emergency Command Center officials in Sacramento said the fires had inflicted minor injuries on 24 firefighters, including the 18 caught in a 300-acre fire raging out of control in remote, northeastern Modoc County. A semi-controlled, 350-acre blaze near Auburn in Placer and Nevada counties destroyed five rural residences, they said.

Federal, state and local fire agencies were spread so thin, Pitt said, that no one was fighting many of the smallest fires and undersized forces were falling back to roads and waiting for blazes to burn to them in other cases.

“We’re really tapped. We just don’t have any more resources to commit at this time,” said Pitt.

The Forestry Department’s ability to halt new fires was crippled, with 159 hand crews, or 78% of its total, and 253 engines, or 55% of the total, already committed to existing blazes. Within the various national forests, most of the U.S. Forest Service forces were committed, as well. About 34 state and federal air tankers, dozens of helicopters and more than 26 bulldozers also were working the fires.

Additional federal firefighters were expected to begin arriving today, Pitt said, as authorities continue searching for additional lightning-caused fires they fear are smoldering undetected in the dry forests and brush.

“The big concern is that this weather pattern that caused the lightning will continue until Wednesday, then will change and bring in breezes, but that will just help to fuel the spread of fires,” she said.

Thunderstorms in some cases forced huge volumes of air toward the ground, causing fires to virtually explode, she said.

The storms, the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada and in far Northern California, hit hardest in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, where 75 fires have burned more than 300 acres.

In the Stanislaus National Forest, 41 fires have burned more than 2,000 acres. “I guess we probably had more lightning than anyone else did,” said Ranger Dick Wisehart.

A 500-acre fire remained out of control five miles west of Yosemite National Park on the north side of the Merced River, but forest officials weren’t as concerned about it because no homes were in danger, Wisehart added.

In the southern Sierra, a fire in brush and rocky terrain eight miles northeast of Lake Isabella in Kern County had burned 1,000 acres, said Tom Kuekes, spokesman for Sequoia National Forest.

In Six Rivers National Forest, three fires had burned an unknown number of acres, with Klamath National Forest reporting 53 and more than 175 acres; Modoc, eight and less than 50 acres; Lassen, 36 and less than 50 acres; Mendocino, five and less than 10 acres; Plumas, 45 and about 600 acres; Tahoe, 40 and 75 acres; El Dorado, 11 and less than 10 acres; and Sierra, 41 and about 1,200 acres.

In the Modoc County blaze, the injured firefighters, many of whom scrambled under the special heat-resistant blankets they carry, were treated at hospitals, fire officials said.