At least four firefighters have been injured over the last week while battling three wildfires in Northern California forests that are burning amid extreme heat in steep, bone-dry terrain, fire officials said Monday.
One firefighter combating the barely-contained Green fire in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest sustained a blunt-force trauma wound while working on the fire line on Saturday, said Deanna Younger, a spokeswoman for California Interagency Management Team 10, the incident command team overseeing the fire response.
Another firefighter suffered a heat-related injury on Sunday, she said. Both were treated at a hospital and released.
Two firefighters fighting the Orleans Complex — two blazes burning in Del Norte and Siskiyou counties — also were stricken with heat illness amid temperatures that have topped 110 degrees in recent days, said Paul Meznarich, a spokesman for the multi-agency team coordinating the response to those fires.
“Everyone is very mindful of the heat effects,” Meznarich said. “All things considered, everyone has been managing the heat well.”
For those fighting the blazes — which, combined, have charred nearly 20,000 acres of forest since July 1 — the conditions have been extremely challenging, fire officials said. The remote areas are steep, thickly-forested and bone-dry.
“It is very, very dry right now, and we’re still around 100 degrees,” Younger said of the Green fire region on Monday morning. “We are not getting good humidity recovery at night.
The Green fire — burning on the eastern side of Shasta Lake near the Pit River between Interstate 5 and Highway 299 — was sparked by lightning the evening of July 1, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
It had burned 11,643 acres and was 5% contained as of Monday afternoon.
On July 1 and 2, the Shasta-Trinity National Forest saw more than 3,100 lightning strikes, which sparked more than two dozen fires, most of which were small and quickly extinguished by firefighters who had been “positioned throughout the forest in anticipation of wildfires caused by lightning strikes,” according to the Forest Service.
“The Forest Service was able to catch all of them except this one,” Younger said of the Green fire. “That’s because this one was so inaccessible.”
Firefighters are gaining access to some areas that are unreachable by vehicle or foot by taking boats to more accessible areas and climbing in with their gear, Younger said. Fighting the blaze by air, she added, has been complicated because there is a thick tree canopy, and water cannot reach the fire burning in vegetation close to the ground.
Planes also have not been able to fly amid heavy smoke, fire officials said.
More than 1,400 firefighters were assigned to the blaze as of Monday. Two so-called Super Scooper airplanes — each of which can hold 1,600 gallons of water — arrived from Canada on Sunday, according to the Forest Service.
The Super Scoopers, which require a mile of open water to refill their onboard tanks, are expected to use multiple arms of Shasta Lake, which fills with recreational boaters during the peak summer tourist season.
“The physics involved in the contest between a fully loaded plane and recreational watercraft are unfortunate at best,” the Forest Service said in a statement asking boaters to avoid areas where firefighting aircraft were operating.
To the west, two fires — the Butler and Red fires — were being managed by the same incident command team as the so-called Orleans Complex fire.
The Butler fire, which was reported amid a lightning storm July 3, had burned roughly 8,156 acres in the Six Rivers and Klamath national forests and was completely uncontained as of Monday afternoon, Maznarich said.
The fire was burning between the tiny towns of Orleans and Forks of Salmon, the latter of which was under an evacuation warning on Monday.
It was burning within the 2024 Boise Fire, the 2020 Salmon Fire, and the 2013 Butler Fire footprints, according to the Forest Service.
Firefighters, some patrolling on boats, were working to keep the fire from jumping the Salmon River because areas east of it had not recently burned and had more dense vegetation, Maznarich said.
The 116-acre Red fire, which was 50% contained, was burning in the Siskiyou Wilderness in Del Norte County, Maznarich said. It started July 6.
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