Crews achieve 45% containment by Friday morning, with blaze having consumed more than 19,200 acres in California’s Mariposa county
Firefighters have made significant progress battling the ferocious Oak fire burning in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Yosemite national park, achieving 45% containment by Friday morning. The blazehas consumed more than 19,200 acres, fueled through the dry, overgrown vegetation coating the hillsides and favorable fire conditions that spurred erratic and extreme behavior.
The Oak fire is one of many disasters raging across the US, as scorching temperatures baked the Pacific north-west, the west remained parched in record drought, and severe storms sent flash floods surging across several states. At least four people have died due to the extreme heat in Oregon, according to the state medical examiner, while the“We may have even lost entire families,” said Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, speaking in an update posted on YouTube.
“Instead of random extreme weather events, we’re seeing these large-scale anomalies,” said climate scientist Karen McKinnon, who studies climate variability at the University of“Most evidence pointed to the extreme 120F temperatures in the Pacific north-west last year as being largely a freak event,” she said. “But if we see it again, that’s a huge signal that something about the underlying physics of the system is changing.
“This time last year we had multiple fires burning throughout the state,” Vasquez said, adding that the lack of competition for resources played a big part in enabling crews to attack the fire quickly. “We had so many personnel and they got here quickly because we had a wide range of personnel not assigned to other incidents.”
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