Photos: Inside the fight to contain the Dixie Fire

Thousands of Northern California residents were forced to flee their homes this week, as the Dixie Fire continued to burn through thousands of acres. The wildfire, which is the state’s largest so far, tore through a mountainous region still scarred by the deadly 2018 Camp Fire, which killed at least 85 people and largely destroyed the remote town of Paradise.

The Dixie Fire started July 13, just miles from where the deadly Camp Fire began. Many residents who survived that inferno were forced to flee again.

The blaze has so far consumed more than 240,000 acres — an area roughly five times the size of the District of Columbia — and is just 23 percent contained, according to Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency.

The cause is still under investigation, but Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility, which pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges after its power lines ignited the Camp Fire, said last week that its equipment may have also sparked the Dixie Fire.

Nearly 6,000 firefighters from across the state are battling the blaze, including teams of California correctional center inmates trained in fighting forest fires. Cal Fire said it had deployed scores of equipment to the area, including 30 helicopters equipped with water buckets, 514 fire engines and 30 water trucks.

But the fire has outpaced containment efforts, merging last weekend with another blaze, the Fly Fire, and ushering in intense smoke and cloud cover, which have hampered aerial suppression efforts.

In recent days, Kyle Grillot, a Los Angeles-based photographer documenting the Dixie Fire for The Washington Post, found himself navigating smoldering rural roads as he shadowed a team of firefighters trying to contain the blaze.

The few hotels around were booked solid into mid-August with firefighters and evacuees, so he slept in his car one night.

“The smoke wears on you,” Grillot said. “And it’s like that for anyone in the West right now who is either near a wildfire zone or anywhere dealing with smoke. You can sleep six or eight hours a night and wake up tired because of how bad the air is.”

While the Bootleg Fire burning in rural Oregon is bigger than the Dixie Fire, the California inferno is spreading in a more populous area, with thousands of residents under mandatory evacuation orders.

So far, no one has been killed, according to Cal Fire, but at least 64 structures had been destroyed as of Friday.

Many officials worry the state’s deepening drought will add to what has already been a destructive wildfire season in California, which typically runs from June to November.

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Credits

Photo editing and Production by Karly Domb Sadof