After days of calmer weather conditions in the north Sierra Nevada foothills, where the deadly North Complex wildfire continues to burn, crews are bracing for more gusty winds Thursday and Friday that will have the potential to again flare up fire activity.
A cold front is expected to bring more intense wind to the northeast corner of California and a large portion of the Sierra Nevada range, and the National Weather Service office in Reno has put a red flag warning in place from 1 p.m. Thursday through the end of Friday due to critical fire danger just east of the North Complex.
The fire complex in Butte and Plumas counties has been burning for a full month. It was sparked by lightning Aug. 17 near Plumas National Forest. Then, last week, the southwest corner of that complex — at the time known as the Bear Fire and now referred to as the West Zone — jumped the Middle Fork of the Feather River, sprinting furiously into communities north of Lake Oroville.
Butte County authorities say the West Zone has killed at least 15 people and largely destroyed the community of Berry Creek, after roaring to life with the help of gusts exceeding 50 mph. Cal Fire, the state fire agency, said this week that part of the West Zone has spread to an area with no known fire history in the past century.
Along with the western edge of Nevada, this week’s red flag warning includes eastern Plumas County, plus parts of Lassen, Sierra and Nevada counties, along with the entire greater South Lake Tahoe area. The NWS forecast predicts sustained winds from 15 to 25 mph, with gusts up to 40 mph possible each afternoon, throughout those affected areas. At higher elevations among Sierra Nevada peaks and ridges, gusts could reach about 60 mph in the afternoons and exceed 70 mph overnight.
In a Thursday morning incident update, Cal Fire says there is potential for “erratic fire behavior on some parts of the fire” in the afternoon, and fire officials are bracing for gusts in the lower elevations that include the West Zone to reach about 20 mph. The U.S. Forest Service, which is the lead agency for the North and South zones of the large wildfire complex, reports that it expects gusts of about 35 mph in those two zones.
The North Complex has now been mapped at 280,775 acres with 36% containment, including the 78,000-acre West Zone, which is now 35% contained. The complex remains the fifth-deadliest and sixth-largest wildfire ever recorded in California, according to Cal Fire, and it is less than 1,200 acres from overtaking the 2017 Thomas Fire to become the fifth-biggest blaze in state history.
The fire is actively burning along the South Fork of the Feather River, in areas “with no known fire history over the past 100 years,” Cal Fire’s latest situation report says. Jay Kurth, incident commander for California Interagency Incident Management Team 4, wrote in a letter describing last week’s explosion on the West Zone fire that what started as a spot fire “moved 20 miles beyond (where) all fire prediction models” anticipated it would spread.
As of Wednesday evening, Butte sheriff’s and coroner’s officials had identified and named 12 of the 15 victims lost to the wildfire. Of them, 10 were residents of Berry Creek, and two lived in Feather Falls a few miles to the east.
The West Zone has destroyed at least 1,078 structures, hundreds of them homes, and continues to threaten more than 23,000 others across portions of Butte, Plumas and Yuba counties, Cal Fire reports.
Mandatory evacuation orders remain in place for Berry Creek, Brush Creek, Big Bend and Feather Falls in Butte County; for La Porte and Bucks Lake in Plumas County; and communities north and east of Brownsville in Yuba County, including Challenge, Forbestown, Woodleaf, Clipper Mils and Strawberry Valley.
Orders for the Butte County community of Cherokee were reduced from mandatory to an evacuation warning on Tuesday. The city of Oroville and the towns of Palermo and Honcut had their warnings lifted over the weekend, sheriff’s officials said.
About 2,100 firefighters remain assigned to the West Zone, Cal Fire says, with 1,000 more assigned to the rest of the North Complex. Smoke in the immediate fire zone continues to limit aircraft use in combating the blaze, which is burning in rugged terrain with difficult access for ground crews.
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