Scores of wildfires were growing on Wednesday in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada after 16,761 lightning strikes hit California this week in a remarkable weather blitz.
One of the blazes has already destroyed some buildings in Chinese Camp, a historically significant gold rush town. A separate wildfire forced the evacuation of hundreds of residents near Murphys, Calif., another gold country town that has become a popular tourist stop.
At least 22 distinct fires broke out southeast of Sacramento, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. They ranged from spot fires of just a few acres to the largest, which had burned more than 6,000 acres and led the authorities to issue evacuation orders. More than 13,000 acres have burned in total in the region, Cal Fire said.
David Acuña, a battalion chief at Cal Fire who confirmed the lightning strike total across California, said that firefighters were racing on Wednesday to ensure that small, smoldering fires caused by the lightning did not develop into uncontrollable ones.
“Our concern is that there may be additional fires that pop up as these hot and windy conditions persist,” he said.
The fires in the Sierra foothills of Tuolumne and Calaveras Counties, which are collectively known as TCU September Lightning Complex, were 0 percent contained by Wednesday afternoon. The fires were fueled by “critically dry” grass and brush, Cal Fire said.
The biggest fire within the complex, called the 6-5, was burning in and around Chinese Camp, an important center of early Chinese American life about 20 miles northeast of Modesto. The town housed more than 5,000 residents during the gold rush in the 19th century and was a stagecoach stop that helped link small Chinatowns and multicultural mining towns scattered throughout the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Chinese miners, cooks, doctors, saloonkeepers, tailors and other tradesman lived in the camp after being driven out of another nearby camp, according to a Visit Tuolumne County brochure. Most of the miners had traveled from Guangdong, in southern China.
Today, the town has a population of just 61. It is designated as a California Historic Landmark.
“It’s so painful,” said Richard Beale, the owner of the Chinese Camp Store and Tavern, a local grocery store and community gathering spot that survived the fire.
Mr. Beale was not at the store when the fire broke out — he works at a nuclear research laboratory two hours away — but he said he had learned from neighbors that many of the historic structures had been ravaged by the fire and looked like “one of those cathedrals burned out after World War II.”
Images from the town showed the brick facade of the post office, a former Wells Fargo stagecoach stop, still standing but the rear of the building flattened by the fire.
Mr. Beale said treasure seekers with metal detectors had come across Chinese coins in recent years. He has also gathered documents and other bits of history from the English, the Mexicans and the native Miwok who lived in the area during the Gold Rush.
“It’s one of those places that had a bit of history from all those cultures,” he said. “They came together and they made something unique.”
The authorities issued evacuation orders for the residents of Chinese Camp and the surrounding area. More than 300 people were within the evacuation order zone and an additional 261 were under evacuation warnings, according to a New York Times analysis of the zones and LandScan population data.
Emily Kilgore, a Cal Fire spokeswoman, confirmed that some historic structures had been destroyed by the fire. But she added that the authorities did not yet have a clear sense of the extent of the damage.
About 25 miles north, the 2-7 fire forced more about 570 people to evacuate and an additional 1,200 to prepare to leave near the town of Murphys, according to a New York Times analysis.
California has experienced an unusual number of lightning strikes this summer, but those in earlier months didn’t spark as many large wildfires because they were accompanied by more precipitation from the Pacific Ocean. This week, most areas received less than 0.1 of an inch of rain, according to the National Weather Service.
The state broke records for the total number of lightning strikes in July and August, said Brent Wachter, a fire meteorologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Redding.
From Aug. 22 to 27, there were 67,000 strikes in Central and Southern California and 42,000 strikes in Northern California, he said. He said the more than 16,700 lightning strikes this week in California had occurred from Tuesday through 7 a.m. on Wednesday.
“This summer has been the year of lightning,” Mr. Wachter said.
Before the lightning arrived this week, a heat wave blanketed Northern California over the Labor Day weekend, raising the risk of wildfires after an unusually temperate summer. Wildfires have burned more than 425,000 acres this year in California, slightly more than last year at this point, but well below the five-year average of 770,000 acres.
A vast majority of wildfires in California are caused by human activity, including arson, faulty electrical equipment and accidental ignitions caused by machinery, cigarettes, campfires and fireworks. Only 3 percent of fires last year were caused by lightning, according to Cal Fire.
But after a long stretch of arid weather, lightning storms can be particularly dangerous. Five years ago, 12,000 lightning strikes in Northern California over a 72-hour period ignited around 600 fires that destroyed 2,700 homes and killed at least six people.
The fires that ignited Tuesday were not the first to destroy gold rush landmarks. Wildfires in 2022 tore through Gold Country in California and razed Mountain House, a former stagecoach hotel with a saloon-style balcony, once a way station on a road notorious for bandits.
Yan Zhuang is a Times reporter in Seoul who covers breaking news.
Thomas Fuller, a Page One Correspondent for The Times, writes and rewrites stories for the front page.
Amy Graff is a Times reporter covering weather, wildfires and earthquakes.
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