"Dry Lightning" Sets Much Of The West On Fire

Much of the tiny town of Chinese Camp, California
was destroyed by a wildfire caused by a barrage
of "dry lightning" this wee. The town was 
a historic Gold Rush hamlet with many
Chinese immigrants. Pictured is one of
the destroyed historic buildings there. 

Lightning strikes this week greatly added to the already growing list of western wildfires, especially in California. 

In just one 24 hour period earlier this week, nearly 17,000 lightning strikes were recorded in California. Many of those were "dry lightning" which is lightning in storms that produce little or no rain. 

These are especially dangerous in the West, as it's the driest time of the year out there. 

Vegetation has been cooking in the summer sunshine in a season that almost never brings much rain. So, inevitably, a bunch of new wildfires started with the lightning. 

As of today, many continued to burn. 

The worst of it might have been a broad area near the San Francisco Bay area early Tuesday morning. 

Per USA Today:

"Between  midnight and 5:30 a.m. local time, nearly 4,800 lightning strikes were recorded, including in-cloud and cloud to ground lightning.  Lightning data shared by the National Weather Service showed that the lightning strikes were concentrated in areas between the inland East Bay and Central Valley." 

Not much rain accompanied the Bay Area thunderstorms.  The National Weather Service office in the Bay Area reported numerous fire starts. So far, the new fires have not consumed much acreage. 

Another lightning hotspot on Tuesday was in the central and southern Sierra Nevada foothills.  Daniel Swain, a University of California Los Angeles climate scientist, said at around noon local time that there were dozens of new lightning ignitions already reported mostly in the foothills with many more coming in by the minute. 

These new fires were in addition to several fires that had been burning for several days. Many of these fires were spreading amid hot, dry weather. 

The fires have already created some serious losses. As the Washington Post reports: 

"Several parts of Tuolumne County, including the town of Chinese Camp, were ordered to evacuate on Tuesday. Video footage shared by KCRA 3 News, a Sacramento broadcaster, showed destroyed homes and downed power lines in the town, a historic mining settlement once home to thousands of Chinese immigrants during the Gold Rush." 

The fact there are already so many new fires, in addition to the pre-existing ones, makes it hard for firefighters to figure out which blazes to target, since they can't get to them all. That increases the chances that any of the fires could really get out of hand and race through a town or neighborhood when the winds pick up. 

To give you an idea how many fires are overwhelming responders, there's this:  The initial firefighters responding to a blaze usually give a particular wildfire a name based on things like nearby landmarks. So you get things like the Gifford Fire now burning in California, and the Dragon Bravo fire, which burned 106 buildings on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in early July and is still burning

So many lightning-started blazes cropped up Tuesday that CalFire just called the collection of blazes the TCU September Lightning Complex and are given individual new fires numbers, like the 6-5 Fire and the 2-7 Fire.  There's no time to come up with names. 

It also doesn't help that the weather pattern is keeping much of California and the Pacific Northwest unusually warm this week, and mostly dry. In the far northwestern part of California, vegetation is at near record dry levels for this time of year.

Several wildfires are also raging in British Columbia, Canada amid unprecedented September heat.  Ashcroft, British Columbia hit 105.4 degrees Fahrenheit Wednesday, the hottest September temperature on record for the entire nation of Canada. 

More dry lighting is going on today in parts of British Columbia, Oregon and Washington today and tomorrow, so there might be even more blazes to add to the long list of 'em currently burning. 

Meanwhile, the fires are producing widespread air quality alerts in large parts of Washington, Oregon, Idahos, Wyoming and western Montana.

It's starting to affect us here in Vermont again. I noticed a little smoke aloft today, after going at least two weeks with very little smoke in the air around here. 

Fires still burning in Canada, along with the growing number of fires in the western United States will keep spreading smoke across much of the nation, probably for the next several weeks.