Sharjah24 – Reuters: Strike teams battling a mammoth wildfire displacing thousands of northern California residents braced for a resurgence of high winds on Monday, as the state's largest utility warned widespread precautionary power shutoffs were likely this week.
The so-called Dixie fire has blackened nearly 570,000 acres (230,670 hectares) of drought-parched timber and brush in the rugged Sierra Nevada mountains northeast of San Francisco since erupting on July 14, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).
Some 1,200 homes and other structures have gone up in flames, including most of the historic downtown area of Greenville, a gold rush mining hamlet engulfed by the blaze more than a week ago.
No fatalities have been reported. All but one of several people listed as missing after Greenville was largely destroyed have since turned up safe, though one man still unaccounted for may have moved from the area prior to the fire, according to the Plumas County Sheriff's Office.
Roughly 15,000 additional structures were listed as threatened on Monday, and nearly 28,700 people were estimated to be under evacuation orders, said Jim Evans, a spokesman for the Dixie fire incident command.
The Dixie ranks as the second-largest California wildfire on record - surpassed only by the million-acre-plus August Complex Fire of 2020. It is also the biggest by far among scores of conflagrations raging across the Western United States in a highly incendiary summer wildfire season experts say is symptomatic of climate change.
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