More than a month after it ignited near a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. power station in Feather River Canyon, the relentless Dixie fire shows no signs of slowing down as it continues to threaten homes and strain firefighting resources.
The fire had burned 540,581 acres, destroyed at least 738 residences and commercial properties and forced nearly 29,000 people from their homes as of Saturday morning, authorities said. Nearly 15,000 structures remained threatened.
The fire made a number of significant runs Friday, sending up multiple large columns of ash and smoke that in at least one case generated its own lightning, officials said. Its ferocity has stunned even veteran firefighters, adding an element of unpredictability that makes it difficult to determine when they’ll be able to get the upper hand.
“‘Typical’ is a challenging word for us,” said Dan McKeague, public information officer with the U.S. Forest Service, noting the massive fire is unusual in both its sheer size and its erratic behavior. “When you have the combination of this active a fire over this big of a landscape, there’s not much typical about it.”
The fire, which was 31% contained, prompted new evacuation orders for Genesee Valley on Friday night as thunderstorms swept through, causing erratic outflow winds that increased fire activity, McKeague said.
“You can have really sudden changes in terms of the wind direction when we have those outflow drafts,” he said. “If you picture a faucet where water is coming down and then when it hits the sink it spreads out in all directions, that’s what that air is doing as those pressure systems interact.”
Fire officials were eying Saturday’s conditions nervously, as a smoke inversion that had put a cap on the fire earlier in the week had cleared out, he said.
“That puts more sun on the fire, and potentially more air movement,” he said. “That’s not a good thing in terms of fire behavior.”
Firefighters on the western flank of the fire saw a lot of activity along Highway 36 between Chester and Westwood, where crews put in 50 to 100 feet of contingency line, said Edwin Zuniga, public information officer with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
“A lot of structure protection resources are being assigned to that specific area to protect the peninsula on Lake Almanor, the cabins along that stretch of Highway 36 and the community of Westwood,” he said.
The weather was continuing to pose a challenge, with hotter and drier conditions forecast for the next couple days, he said.
Temperatures in the area of the fire were expected to reach anywhere from the upper 80s to just shy of 100, depending on the smoke cover, said Scott Rowe, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento.
The Dixie fire ignited July 13 near the spot where a tree fell into a PG&E power line. The utility has said it took a worker about 10 hours to reach the remote site and observe flames.
Although the cause of the fire remains under review, prosecutors in at least two counties are investigating PG&E for potential criminal charges, saying it should have been aware of the high risk of fire in the canyon. It is the same canyon where PG&E equipment ignited the 2018 Camp fire, which saw the utility plead guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter after the town of Paradise was decimated. PG&E had planned to bury the power line that might have started the Dixie fire as part of a safety campaign announced in the wake of the Camp fire, but work on the project hadn’t yet begun.
The Dixie fire took off amid extreme conditions, as human-caused climate change has sent temperatures rising and upended the natural patterns of precipitation on which California relies to supply its ecosystems with water.
The state this year saw its hottest June and July on record, with the heat most intense in the interior areas where the fire is burning, Rowe said.
Authorities have also blamed a century of aggressive fire suppression for creating patches of forest that are overgrown with thick understories of dry brush and in some cases enabli.
