Unprecedented Weather Plays Significant Role in California Wildfire

Fire officials say unprecedented weather conditions played a defining role in the early hours of the Eiler Fire, fueling its explosive growth from a small spot fire in the Thousand Lakes wilderness to a major wildfire that has ravaged more than 31,722 acres over the past week in eastern Shasta County.

On the afternoon of Aug. 1, the fast-growing blaze roared out of the wilderness in Lassen National Forest and into the small community of Hat Creek, where it burned eight homes, an iconic restaurant and a Redding fire engine as its crew worked to defend one of the burned structures. The fire was reported to be 45 percent contained Friday evening.

While the buildup of downed trees and other vegetation in the wilderness area undoubtedly fueled the fire’s growth, many fire experts and national forest officials have said that unusually hot and dry weather patterns, exacerbated by the state’s ongoing drought, created conditions that may have made it nearly impossible to get a handle on a wildfire sparked in such remote, rugged terrain.

“Some people are calling the conditions ‘explosive,’” said Kit Mullen, Hat Creek District Ranger with the Lassen National Forest. “It’s not the normal or even the high risks we’d have in a normal year – it’s beyond that. Normally smoke jumpers would have caught a fire like that, as they have in years past, but this year conditions are so different that I don’t think we could have gotten any resources on that fire Thursday afternoon (July 31) or evening to stop it. It was just unstoppable.”

A team of eight smoke jumpers scrambled from Redding when smoke from the fire was spotted that Thursday afternoon, and a fire engine crew made the roughly two-hour hike to the spot of the fire, Mullen said. But as the small band of firefighters battled through the night, it became clear the fire was growing too fast, too strong to contain.

Forest officials sent in a 20-person strike team the following day and some hired firefighters from Firestorm, a private company that specializes in fire suppression, but it wasn’t enough to stop the spread. That afternoon the fire came out of the wilderness and down Brown’s Butte into Hat Creek.

“That fire came across that road (Highway 89 in Hat Creek) like people had never seen in their lives,” Shasta County Fire Chief Mike Hebrard told county supervisors earlier this week. “Thirty- and 40-year firefighters saying, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’ It is dry. The drought has got the fuel so dry it’s just exploding when it comes through, and that’s the words that people are using.”

Hat Creek resident Ray Parker stayed in town despite mandatory evacuation orders that day to protect Brown Ranch, where he lives and works. He described the onslaught as a “fire tornado.”

“It was incredible,” he said. “I’d guess the flames were whipping 600 feet high, with 80-90 mph winds.”

About 1,872 firefighters continue to battle the flames. Firefighters made substantial progress on the fire this week after light rains brought cooler temperatures and a rise in humidity. Yet the fire has continued to grow, burning mainly in wilderness areas where bulldozers don’t have access and often aren’t allowed to plow fire lines.

Some federal agencies managing public lands have been criticized in the past for policies that let naturally started wildfires burn under the right conditions. Notably, Lassen Volcanic National Park officials caught heat after the lightning-sparked Reading Fire in 2012 was allowed to smolder in overgrowth for more than a week before it got out of hand and exploded to scorch about 27,163 acres.

But with the current conditions in California, no fires are allowed to burn this time of year, national forest officials have said. Even in less fire-prone conditions, Lassen National Forest’s fire management plans designate that all fires in the Thousnad Lakes and Caribou wilderness areas be contained or controlled and not allowed to burn.

“Even though fire is a natural process in the wilderness, we don’t want it to burn out of the wilderness area as the Eiler Fire did in the Thousand Lakes wilderness, though that wasn’t from lack of trying (to contain it),” Mullen said.

The general consensus among fire officials is that forest mismanagement or fuel loading weren’t the definitive factors in the Eiler Fire’s growth, said Ryan DeSantis, forestry and natural resource adviser with the University of California Cooperative Extension Office in Shasta County.

“Right now we have such extreme fire conditions that those types of things aren’t that surprising,” he said. “We already have the driest period on record for the state of California, and it’s the period of time when we’re in our natural seasonal drought anyways, and when you combine all of those things it’s just not that surprising.”

Mullen said the buildup of timber in the Thousand Lakes area had been a fuel concern, also noted in the forest’s fire management plan, but the resources simply weren’t available to address the issue in time. She said the park was looking at thinning forest land north of there in the coming years and exploring options to eventually thin the wilderness area through prescribed burning.

“It’s a very tricky situation that, frankly, has taken a lot of time and effort to approach and do anything there, and it will be a while before we get ready to go,” she said. “In the wilderness areas we really need appropriated funds, tax dollars, because there’s no commercial means to get wood out of there, but I don’t want people to think the Thousand Lakes is an unusual situation. There are wilderness areas in the Rockies that are far worse off than we are here.”