Much Of Big Creek, CA, Pop 200, Has Burned; Another 7,000-Acre Blaze From Gender Reveal Fireworks
It was an old company town tucked away in the Sierra Nevada, where life revolved around shifts at the Edison hydroelectric plant. Neighbors visited at the post office and had coffee at a general store that smoked its own meats. And every wildfire season, the threat of destruction loomed like the granite rock faces towering over their town.
On Monday, residents of Big Creek, Calif., population 200, began coming to grips with the reality that this time much of their tiny community in the Sierra National Forest northeast of Fresno had burned. “We lost our home,” said Nettie Carroll, 40, who taught science and has lived in the area for 16 years. “It looks like everything is completely gone.”
As California endures one of its worst wildfire seasons ever, a new rash of fires stoked by extreme heat has destroyed homes, cloaked much of the state in smoke, forced thousands of people to evacuate and threatened another round of rolling blackouts. One of the fires, a 7,000-acre blaze in San Bernardino County erupted after a family set off a “smoke-generating pyrotechnic device” to announce their baby’s sex.
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Big Creek residents who fled the galloping Creek Fire over the weekend said that more than a dozen homes had been incinerated. The Creek Fire had burned nearly 79,000 acres by Monday and was zero percent contained, according to Cal Fire, the state fire agency.
From hotel rooms in Fresno and Modesto or family members’ spare bedrooms where they had fled, Big Creek’s evacuees spent Monday sending one another photographs of flames and char and comparing notes on what had survived and what had not.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/us/ca-wildfires-heatwave.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
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