California wildfires update#

A grove of Yosemite’s giant, ancient sequoia trees did come under threat from another wildfire weeks ago. The northward direction of the fire was taking it into the Sierra National Forest but no longer in the direction of Yosemite, some 10 miles (16 km) away. “It was a perfect storm of a good kind,” said Hector Vasquez, a Cal Fire spokesperson, at the command post in Mariposa, California, closer to the fire. The absence of other major fires in the region enabled Cal Fire to concentrate 2,500 firefighters on the blaze, and the lack of wind allowed for the continuous use of aircraft to drop water and fire retardant, officials said. Several officials with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) said the fire initially behaved unlike any other they had seen, with burning embers sparking smaller fires up to two miles (three km) in front of the main conflagration.īut firefighters have not seen more of that so-called spotting, Cal Fire spokesperson Natasha Fouts said on Monday from the incident command center in Merced, about 130 miles (210 km) inland from San Francisco. This map was created by Liz Anderson, Emily Zentner, Veronika Nagy, Chris Hagan, Renee Thompson, Katy Kidwell and Helga Salinas.The Oak Fire expanded rapidly since it began on Friday, overwhelming the initial deployment of firefighters, as extremely hot and dry weather fueled its galloping pace through dry forest and underbrush. Fire namesĬapRadio changed the names of three fires on this map that included a racial slur in accordance with Associated Press guidelines and our own standards. Fires may be missing altogether or have missing or incorrect attribute data.

As of September 2020, Cal Fire had found that the dataset is missing 483 notable fires and is looking to find and add these. However, the data is by nature incomplete and duplicates may exist. Ten acres is the federal minimum for reporting.Ĭal Fire says that this dataset - which runs from 1878 to 2020 as of April 2021 and is updated annually - is one of the most complete datasets of California’s fires through history. Cal Fire’s data includes timber fires that burned more than 10 acres, brush fires that burned more than 50 acres and grass fires that burned more than 300 acres, so some smaller fires may not be shown here. Some fires may be missing because historical records were lost or damaged, were too small for the minimum cutoffs, had inadequate documentation or have not yet been incorporated into the database. This means that the causes shown for some fires may be out of date.

California wildfires update#

Cal Fire enters the cause of each year’s fires when this data is captured annually and does not update them if investigations are later completed or determinations are changed. Fire causesĪlso displayed here are the reported cause and acres of each fire shown. These fires are also categorized by the meteorological season in which they started, which are as follows: Winter (December - February), Spring (March - May), Summer (June - August) and Fall (September - November). 2020 is also shown separately because there has been only one recorded fire year so far in the 2020s decade in this dataset. Fires that started between 18 are shown separately here due to more inconsistencies in data for earlier fires. 77 fires that did not include a year in the data have been left out. These wildfires are categorized by the decade or time period in which they started. This map and data is not intended to be used for legal purposes or statistical analysis. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S.

This map shows the perimeters of more than 20,000 wildfires that have been recorded in California from 1878 to 2020 using data from Cal Fire, the National Parks Service, the U.S.