In October 1991, a grass fire was reported in Northern California near the Caldecott Tunnel on a slope in the Berkeley Hills. The fire was small, but five years of drought had primed the eucalyptus and Monterey pines for the blaze. It was nighttime before firefighters finished checking for hot spots and counted themselves lucky it had not been windier.
By noon the next day, that luck had run out.
As a Diablo wind rose, fallen embers that had seemed dead the previous evening suddenly came alive. Mop-up crews who had come back to make one last check and retrieve their fire hoses watched in astonishment as flaming pine needles went flying and trees exploded into one of the deadliest wildfires ever in California.
Mark Hoffman, 71, was a lieutenant in the Oakland fire department when the so-called Tunnel fire swept through, destroying nearly 3,500 homes and killing 25 people. He thought of the fire recently, almost exactly 34 years later, after the authorities in Los Angeles attributed the Palisades fire to remnants of an earlier blaze that firefighters thought had been extinguished.
“It was like, ‘Oh, no — that again,’” Mr. Hoffman said.
They’re called holdover fires, rekindled fires, re-ignitions — even zombie fires. The culprits of many major fires in California are varied and well known: utility-company equipment failures, lightning strikes, arsonists, homeless people or hunters who lit campfires that spun out of control. But some of the most destructive fires in the state’s history were blazes that were assumed to have died but then came roaring back to life hours or even days later.
Experts in wildfire management say these rekindled fires have become increasingly common in California and elsewhere. The phenomenon has been the subject of lawsuits and raised questions about the thoroughness of the efforts of firefighters to completely extinguish wildfires. It has also prompted a wave of new firefighting technology.
One of the reasons they keep happening, fire experts said, is that climate change has made megafires more common and windstorms wilder. As immense wildfires cast embers for miles, flaming debris is harder to trace and extinguish. Under the right conditions, a weak firebrand — a firefighter term for a piece of burning detritus — can become lodged in vegetation for days, weeks or months undetected, then be kindled to life by wind, in the same way a person can lean in and blow on a dying campfire to relight it.
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The post The Destructive Legacy of California’s Zombie Fires appeared first on New York Times.
