Caldor Fire (El Dorado County CA) Destroys Most of Town Of Grizzly Flats, Pop. 1,200
Few homes were left standing in Grizzly Flats, California, the small northern California forest town leveled by the Caldor fire on Tuesday. Streets in the town of about 1,200 people were littered with downed power lines and poles. Houses were reduced to smoldering ash and twisted metal with only chimneys rising above the ruins. A post office and elementary school were also destroyed. Two people were in the hospital with serious injuries.
Thousands more structures still lay in the path of the fast-moving fire. On Wednesday morning, the blaze was 0% contained, with crews desperately working to contain the damage. The destruction in Grizzly Flats came as dangerously dry and windy weather continued to fuel huge blazes across the American west and prompted the nation’s largest utility to begin shutting off power to tens of thousands of customers.
Whipped by the winds, the Caldor fire exhibited extreme behavior as it tore through El Dorado county, exploding in size between Monday and Wednesday morning to more than 53,770 acres. “The fire has grown. It is spreading quickly,” Chris Vestal, a public information officer on the fire, said on Tuesday, noting that the fire had grown so quickly that it was outpacing the department’s ability to document it.
Officials at a community meeting on Tuesday evening said there weren’t enough resources on the ground to effectively battle the blaze, as crews were stretched thin fighting more than 100 fires burning in the west. Only 242 personnel were battling the fire as of Tuesday night but Wednesday’s incident report said additional resources were arriving on the fire. “The rapidly changing complexity and immediate needs of the incident have prevented assessing the quantity of resources resulting in no reported changes to the documented numbers,” the report said.
EDIT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/18/california-wildfires-caldor-dixie-fire-weather-grizzly-flats
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