Sharjah24 – Reuters: South Lake Tahoe stood smoke-filled and largely deserted on Wednesday after crews fought back a huge, wind-driven wildfire, leaving the popular California resort town unscathed as the flames crept toward Nevada.
The Caldor fire, burning since mid-August in the Sierra Nevada range, still threatened homes and businesses near Lake Tahoe, abetted by gusty, bone-dry conditions.
"We steered the fire away" from South Lake Tahoe, Jason Hunter, a spokesman for the Caldor incident command, said by telephone.
The town's 22,000 residents had been ordered to evacuate on Monday after the blaze unexpectedly crested a high ridgeline and swept downslope toward populated areas in the lake basin that straddles the California-Nevada border.
Hunter said the wind direction late on Tuesday and overnight through Wednesday morning helped push flames farther to the northeast rather than straight north toward Tahoe.
"There was a massive amount of heavy-equipment work and structure-protection work along those neighborhoods," he added.
The smaller, unincorporated village of Meyers - a former trading post and onetime Pony Express station a few miles away - was likewise spared, said California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) spokesman Henry Herrera.
"We're not out of the woods yet," Herrera added, but crews managed overnight to "keep the fire outside those communities and away from homes."
Firefighters also got help on Wednesday morning from an atmospheric inversion layer that settled over the Tahoe area overnight, trapping smoke close to the ground and tamping down flames at lower elevations, officials said.
The Caldor fire was among nearly two dozen raging across California and scores of others elsewhere in the West, during a summer fire season shaping up as one of the most destructive on record. The blazes have been stoked by extremely hot, dry conditions that experts say are symptomatic of climate change.
The National Weather Service posted a red-flag warning for dangerously gusty winds of up to 45 miles per hour (72 kph) and extremely low humidity for the Tahoe area through Wednesday night.
As the fire got closer to the Nevada state line, officials expanded the area under evacuation orders to include more of California's sparsely populated Alpine County, on the border.
Authorities across the state line in Douglas County, Nevada, warned residents to be ready to flee at a moment's notice.
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