Sharjah24 – Reuters: Residents and tourists in communities near Lake Tahoe fled on Monday as a fierce, 2-week-old wildfire roared closer to the popular resort destination through drought-parched forests in northern California's Sierra Nevada mountains.
Evacuations in and around the town of South Lake Tahoe came as the U.S. Forest Service said it was taking the unusual step of closing all 18 national forests in California to the public in the midst of a fire season already shaping up as one of the worst on record.
The closure is due to last 17 days, starting Wednesday, and effectively extends a shutdown of nine national forests in northern California that began on Aug. 23 and was due to expire over the upcoming Labor Day holiday weekend.
A similar closure of all 18 national forests in California was imposed last September due to what the Forest Service then called "unprecedented and historic" fire conditions. In its latest announcement, the agency cited "fire behavior that is beyond the norm of our experience."
The agency also cited "significantly limited" resources available for wildfire suppression given the scores of large fires burning in California and a dozen other Western states.
More than 6,800 wildfires have blackened an estimated 1.7 million acres (689,000 hectares) within California alone this season - much of it on Forest Service property - putting 2021 on pace to surpass last year's record amount of landscape consumed by flames.
The so-called Caldor blaze near Lake Tahoe has emerged as one of the most destructive and disruptive this summer, spreading across more than 177,000 acres (71,740 hectares) since Aug. 14, with firefighters managing to carve containment lines around just 14% of its perimeter as of Monday.
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