Mapping California’s Carr Fire
California’s Carr Fire continues to rage across nearly 100,000 acres in Shasta County. More than 1,000 structures have been destroyed or damaged along the fire’s path. As of Monday afternoon, roughly one-fifth of the fire had been contained. Evacuation orders have begun to lift in some areas, but more than 5,000 structures remain under threat, and thousands of residents are far from their homes.
The fire began on Monday, July 23, when a car malfunctioned on Highway 299 in Whiskeytown, according to Cal Fire. Hot and dry weather transformed what started as a slow burn into an expansive blaze. Evacuations began early Thursday morning, as the fire increased to 20,000 acres from just under 7,000 the night before. The fire doubled in size Thursday and did so again Saturday.
Satellite imagery captured Friday shows the massive scale of the fire. The burn scar and active fires are shown in brown and orange, while healthy vegetation is shown in green. Since Friday the fire has expanded to the southwest and to the north, as crews have focused their efforts on the population centers near Redding.
More than 3,300 firefighters have worked to contain the blaze. By Sunday, the fire had begun to turn away from Redding to less-populated regions to the west. The containment level swiftly rose from 5 percent Saturday night to 20 percent Monday. The Carr Fire is expected to burn at least through mid-August.
Carr is just one of more than a dozen wildfires currently blazing in California. Three hundred miles to the south, the Ferguson Fire near Yosemite National Park has burned more than 50,000 acres. In total, wildfires have spread to more than 400,000 acres so far this year in California. With increasingly hot and dry springs and summers, the burned acreage of this year’s wildfires is so far on par with that in previous years.
The wildfire season is not expected to let up anytime soon. Thousands of square miles of dead brush, shrubs and heavy timber, along with unfavorable weather, will keep the wildfire potential above normal through the fall, according to the National Interagency Fire Center’s seasonal outlook.
Joe Fox and Armand Emamdjomeh contributed to this report.
About this story
Fire perimeters from USGS GeoMAC Wildland Fire Support. Building footprints from Microsoft. Landcover data from Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium. False-color satellite imagery from ESA Sentinel-2. California imagery from NASA Worldview, and wildfire locations from CalFire and InciWeb. Acres burned by wildfires from CalFire and the National Interagency Coordination Center.
end quote from:https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/carr-fire/?utm_term=.9d1013904132
