"Most of the state was burning, said Foley, reflecting on how firefighting agencies from all over California assisted each other. The fires down in Santa Cruz County and into Alameda County and then up the coast, they were all fairly simultaneous. We're fortunate to be in the most robust mutual aid system in the country, if not the world. But it doesn't take much for the system to get stripped. There is a limit to what we can do."
"Often fueled by dry lightning, multi-ignition wildfires continue to represent a severe threat and a significant challenge to firefighting efforts and firefighter safety. We see a clear trend for those more extreme fires over western U.S. over the recent one to two decades. But why? said Qi Tang, LLNL scientist and author of the study. One possible reason is that those multi-ignition fires occur when there's dry lightning. When there's a system driving many lightnings, they can start fires in close-by areas."
August 2020 lightning storms ignited multiple, simultaneous wildfires across the Diablo range, Santa Cruz Mountains, and Bay Area wine country, affecting Alameda, Santa Clara, Contra Costa, and San Mateo counties. Simultaneous fire fronts strained an otherwise robust mutual aid system, with volunteers and reinforcements battling CZU, SCU, and LNU complexes. Multi-ignition wildfires, often driven by dry lightning, pose severe threats and significant challenges to firefighting and firefighter safety. A new model developed by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UC Irvine offers improved understanding of multi-ignition fires and the weather systems they generate. A clear trend toward more extreme western U.S. fires has emerged over the past one to two decades.
Read at www.mercurynews.com
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