95 Structures Damaged
1,329 Structures Destroyed
at one point during height of multiple large fires burning in CA —
more recent update —
“There is the extent of the fire and there is the intensity of the fire. When you get these big intense fires, you mostly kill those animals,” said ecologist Brad Shaffer, the director of the UCLA La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science. “If you don’t kill them then when they come back and it’s just a big ash field, there are no plants and therefore no insects. They starve to death.”
In these high-severity burns, vegetation on the forest floor is consumed by the flames, and shrubs and stumps are reduced to ash. The soil itself changes, and even beneath the ground, tree roots are burned. These moonscapes can take between five and 10 years to regenerate – far too long for some species to wait.
Scientists are also finding that some landscapes remain permanently changed and trees struggle to grow where they once flourished. Surviving animals, faced with reduced populations after a fire, may resort to inbreeding, ultimately reducing their resilience while the climate becomes less hospitable. www.theguardian.com/...
“Rather than having some standing trees helping shade the ground and keep it cooler and more moist, it’s just this large expanse of black charred earth which can make it difficult for trees to establish,” Stevens-Rumann said. “There’s a lot of concern about whether these forests are going to have a longer-term conversion, moving away from a forested ecosystem to something else,” she added, explaining that, on this trajectory, once-forested landscapes could soon shift to become shrub-covered chaparral, which is more flammable. Chaparral landscapes, in turn, could convert to grasslands.
Part of why it takes so long to get large fires under control. This is rugged terrain that takes many boots on the ground to do grueling work —
Now the new threat from all the heavy rain the area got over the weekend plus what fell last week —
These are some rain accumulation amounts in Dixie fire areas as of yesterday, before the storm had finished.
Relative to the Caldor fire in El Dorado Co. —