by Keith Schneider
On the afternoon of July 23, a tire on a recreational trailer blew
apart on the pavement of State Route 299 about 15 miles northwest of
Redding, California. The couple towing the Grey Wolf Select trailer
couldn’t immediately pull it out of traffic. As they dragged it to a
safe turnout, sparks arced from the tire’s steel rim. Three reached the
nearby grass and shrubs; two along the highway’s south shoulder, the
third on the north. Each of the sparks ignited what at first seemed like
commonplace brush fires.
But if the sparking of the brush fires was an unpredictable accident,
what happened next was not. Fire jumped from the roadside into the
Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, a 42,000-acre unit of the National
Park Service. There, it gained size and velocity, and took off for the
outskirts of Redding. The fire burned for 39 days and charred over
229,000 acres, and when the last embers died on Aug. 30, the fight to
contain it had cost $162 million, an average of $4.15 million a day.
Almost 1,100 homes were lost. Eight people died, four of them first
responders.
Dozens of interviews and a review of local, state and federal records
show that virtually every aspect of what came to be known as the Carr
Fire — where it ignited; how and where it exploded in dimension and
ferocity; the toll in private property — had been forecast and worried
over for years. Every level of government understood the dangers and
took few, if any, of the steps needed to prevent catastrophe.
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