The Santa Ana winds are strong, extremely dry downslope winds that originate inland and affect coastal Southern California and northern Baja California. They originate from cool, dry high-pressure air masses in the Great Basin.
Crockett is a census-designated place (CDP) in Contra Costa County, in the East Bay sub-region of the San Francisco Bay Area, California. The population was 3,094 at the 2010 census. It is located 28 miles northeast of San Francisco. Other nearby communities include Port Costa, Martinez, Vallejo, Benicia, Rodeo, Hercules, Pinole and Richmond.
The Witch Creek Fire, also known as the Witch Fire, was the second-largest wildfire of the 2007 California wildfire season, burning 197,990 acres (801 km2) of land in San Diego County. Fanned by powerful Santa Ana winds, the Witch Creek Fire rapidly spread westward and consumed large portions of San Diego County. During its duration, flames reached 80 to 100 feet high, and the Witch Fire exhibited the characteristics of a firestorm at its height.
The 2008 California wildfire season was one of the most devastating in the state of the 21st century. While 6,255 fires occurred, about two-thirds as many as in 2007, the total area burned— 1,593,690 acres —far exceeded that of previous years.
The Rim Fire was a massive wildfire that started in a remote canyon in the Stanislaus National Forest in California's Tuolumne County. The fire ignited on August 17, 2013, amid the 2013 California wildfire season, and burned 257,314 acres in largely remote areas of the Sierra Nevada, including a large portion of Yosemite National Park. The Rim Fire was fully contained on Thursday, October 24, 2013, after a nine-week suppression effort by firefighters. Due to a lack of winter rains, some logs smoldered in the interior portion of the fire footprint throughout the winter, and more than a year passed before the fire was declared totally extinguished in November 2014.
The Railroad Fire was a wildfire that burned in between the communities of Sugar Pine and Fish Camp in the Sierra National Forest in California, United States. The fire was reported on August 29, 2017 and burned 12,407 acres (50 km2) before it was fully contained on October 24. It occurred during the historic 2011–2017 California drought. The cause of the fire remains unknown.
The October 2017 Northern California wildfires, also known as the Northern California firestorm, North Bay Fires, and the Wine Country Fires were a series of 250 wildfires that started burning across the state of California, United States, beginning in early October. Twenty-one became major fires that burned at least 245,000 acres (99,148 ha).
The 2018 wildfire season was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire season in California history. It was also the largest on record at the time, now third after the 2020 and 2021 California wildfire seasons. In 2018, there were a total of 103 confirmed fatalities, 24,226 structures damaged or destroyed, and 8,527 fires burning 1,975,086 acres (799,289 ha), about 2% of the state's 100 million acres of land. Through the end of August 2018, Cal Fire alone spent $432 million on operations. The catastrophic Camp Fire alone killed at least 85 people, destroyed 18,804 buildings and caused $16.5 billion in property damage, while overall the fires resulted in at least $26.347 billion in property damage and firefighting costs, including $25.4 billion in property damage and $947 million in fire suppression costs.
The Camp Fire was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California's history, and the most expensive natural disaster in the world in 2018 in terms of insured losses.
The 2019 California power shutoffs, known as public safety power shutoff (PSPS) events, were massive preemptive power shutoffs that occurred in approximately 30 counties in Northern California and several areas in Southern California from October 9 to November 1, 2019, and on November 20, 2019, by Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E). The power shutoffs were an attempt to prevent wildfires from being started by electrical equipment during strong and dry winds. The shutoffs initially affected around 800,000 customer accounts, or about 2.5 million people, but expanded to cause over 3 million people to lose utility-provided electrical power by late October as more utility companies from around the state also did preemptive power shutoffs.
The 2020 California wildfire season, part of the 2020 Western United States wildfire season, was a record-setting year of wildfires in California. By the end of the year, 9,917 fires had burned 4,397,809 acres (1,779,730 ha), more than 4% of the state's roughly 100 million acres of land, making 2020 the largest wildfire season recorded in California's modern history, though roughly equivalent to the pre-1800 levels which averaged around 4.4 million acres yearly and up to 12 million in peak years. California's August Complex fire has been described as the first "gigafire", burning over 1 million acres across seven counties, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. The fires destroyed over 10,000 structures and cost over $12.079 billion in damages, including over $10 billion in property damage and $2.079 billion in fire suppression costs. The intensity of the fire season has been attributed to a combination of more than a century of poor forest management and higher temperatures resulting from climate change.
The August 2020 California lightning wildfires were a series of 650 wildfires that ignited across Northern California in mid-August 2020, due to a siege of dry lightning from rare, massive summer thunderstorms, which were caused by an unusual combination of very hot, dry air at the surface, dry fuels, and advection of moisture from the remains of Tropical Storm Fausto northward into the Bay Area. These fires burned between 1,500,000 acres (6,100 km2) to 2,100,000 acres (8,500 km2) within a 2–3 week period. The August 2020 lightning fires included three enormous wildfires: the SCU Lightning Complex, the August Complex, and the LNU Lightning Complex. On September 10, 2020, the August Complex set a record for the single-largest wildfire in the modern history of California, reaching a total area burned of 471,185 acres (1,907 km2). On September 11, the August Complex merged with the Elkhorn Fire, another massive wildfire of 255,039 acres (1,032 km2), turning the August Complex into a monster wildfire of 746,607 acres (3,021 km2).
The 2020 Creek Fire was a very large wildfire in central California's Sierra National Forest, in Fresno and Madera counties. One of the most significant fires of California's record-setting 2020 wildfire season, it began on September 4, 2020, and burned 379,895 acres (153,738 ha) over several months until it was declared 100% contained on December 24, 2020. The Creek Fire is the fifth-largest wildfire in recorded California history and the second-largest single fire—i.e. not part of a larger wildfire complex—following the 2021 Dixie Fire.
The North Complex Fire was a massive wildfire complex that burned in the Plumas National Forest in Northern California in the counties of Plumas and Butte. 21 fires were started by lightning on August 17, 2020; by September 5, all the individual fires had been put out with the exception of the Claremont and Bear Fires, which merged on that date, and the Sheep Fire, which was then designated a separate incident. On September 8, strong winds caused the Bear/Claremont Fire to explode in size, rapidly spreading to the southwest. On September 8, 2020, the towns of Berry Creek and Feather Falls were immediately evacuated at 3:15 p.m. PDT with no prior warning, By September 9, 2020, the towns of Berry Creek and Feather Falls had been leveled, with few homes left standing. The fire threatened the city of Oroville, before its westward spread was stopped. The fire killed 16 people and injured more than 100. Among the 16 fatalities was a 16-year-old boy. The complex burned an estimated 318,935 acres (129,068 ha), and was 100% contained on December 3. The fire was managed by the U.S. Forest Service in conjunction with Cal Fire, with the primary incident base in Quincy. The North Complex Fire was the sixth-largest in California's modern history, and the deadliest fire in the 2020 California wildfire season.
The Western United States experienced a series of major wildfires in 2020. Severe August thunderstorms ignited numerous wildfires across California, Oregon, and Washington, followed in early September by additional ignitions across the West Coast. Fanned by strong, gusty winds and fueled by hot, dry terrains, many of the fires exploded and coalesced into record-breaking megafires, burning more than 10.2 million acres of land, mobilizing tens of thousands of firefighters, razing over ten thousand buildings, and killing at least 37 people. The fires caused over $19.884 billion in damages, including $16.5 billion in property damage and $3.384 billion in fire suppression costs. Climate change and poor forest management practices contributed to the severity of the wildfires.
The El Dorado Fire burned 22,744 acres in San Bernardino and Riverside counties of California from September to November 2020. It was ignited on September 5 by a pyrotechnic device at a gender reveal party in El Dorado Ranch Park; it quickly spread to the San Gorgonio Wilderness Area of the San Bernardino National Forest. Burning over a 71-day period, the fire destroyed 20 structures and resulted in one firefighter fatality, for which the couple hosting the party were charged with involuntary manslaughter.
The Glass Fire was a wildfire in Northern California, that started on September 27, 2020, at 3:48 AM (PDT) from an undetermined cause and was active for 23 days. It was part of the 2020 California Wildfires and the 2020 Western United States wildfire season. The fire was named due to its origin nearby Glass Mountain Road in Deer Park, Napa County, and it extended also into Sonoma County. Initially a single 20-acre brush fire, it rapidly grew and merged with two smaller fires that expanded to 11,000 acres during the night of September 27 into September 28.
The 2022 California wildfire season was a series of wildfires burning throughout the U.S. state of California. By the end of the year, a total of 7,667 fires had been recorded, totaling approximately 363,939 acres across the state. Wildfires killed nine people in California in 2022, destroyed 772 structures, and damaged another 104. The 2022 season followed the 2020 and 2021 California wildfire seasons, which had the highest and second-highest (respectively) numbers of acres burned in the historical record, with a sharp drop in acreage burned.
The 2020 Dome Fire was a large and ecologically destructive wildfire in the Mojave National Preserve in California's San Bernardino County. Caused by a lightning strike on August 15, the fire began near Cima Dome and exhibited rapid growth over the following 36 hours, aided by weather conditions and a lack of available firefighting resources. During this period the Dome Fire destroyed only 6 structures, but burned more than a quarter of the Cima Dome Joshua tree forest, one of the largest and densest populations of Joshua trees known in the world. The fire killed as many as 1.3 million Joshua trees. No injuries or fatalities were reported among firefighters or civilians. The fire cost US$2.2 million to suppress, and burned 43,273 acres (17,512 ha) before being fully contained on August 24.
