California residents continued to flee Sunday as the state's wildfires worsened despite firefighters working on 24-hour shifts to battle the flames.
The state's largest-ever fires have forced hundreds of thousands from their homes and burned more than one million acres, with fears that more lightning strikes and high winds will start further fires in the days ahead.
There are now nearly a quarter-million people under evacuation orders and warnings.
The National Weather Service cautioned Sunday that yet more dry thunderstorms are on their way, causing concern for the state's fire service which is already stretched too thin.
These conditions 'could cause erratic winds, extreme fire behavior within the existing fires, and have a potential for new fires to start,' the CalFire website said.
Firefighters are already stretched so thin that the state has turned down some local officials' requests for help with equipment or personnel, forcing them to rely on volunteers and local agencies, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
A California resident captured this video of the fires as they fled from their home
The LNU Lightning Complex Fire engulfs a ridge line Sunday
The weather service also issued a red-flag warning for large swaths of northern and central California Sunday due to the covering of smoke that has dangerously impacted air quality. The smoke has now spread as far away as Kansas.
Thousands of lightning strikes have hit the state in the past week, igniting fires that left smoke blanketing the region, bringing the total area burned to 1.2million, according to CalFire public information officer Jeremy Rahn.
That is considered a stunning toll this early in California's fire season, which normally runs from August to November, and it comes as exhausted firefighters are already struggling to keep up with the far-flung blazes.
Crews from across the U.S. West, military planes and National Guard troops poured into California on Sunday.
The worst of the blazes, including the second and third largest wildfires in recorded California history, were burning in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, where more than 200,000 people have been told to flee their homes.
Two of the three largest fires in California history, burning simultaneously in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the wine country north of the San Francisco Bay, are expected to grow in the next few days as a new thunderstorm system moves over the northern half of the state, producing dry lightning and gusty winds.
The National Weather Service issued red-flag warnings across large swaths of Northern and Central California through Monday afternoon. With firefighters already responding to more than two dozen major fires, the storms could ignite even more blazes and cause existing ones to spread more rapidly, pushing crews into a triage situation.
But the sheer magnitude of what has already burned is sobering: about 1.3 million acres this month alone, with four more months of potential fire season to go. Only 2018 saw more land scorched in California — over an entire year.
Now it’s clear that what Californians had feared most during this long, troubled summer has become reality: a terrible fire season in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’m essentially at a loss for words to describe the scope of the lightning-sparked fire outbreak that has rapidly evolved in Northern California — even in the context of the extraordinary fires of recent years,” wrote Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, in a blog post. “It’s truly astonishing.”
The blazes include the LNU Lightning Complex fire, which at just about 350,000 acres is the second-largest fire in California history. The SCU Lightning Complex fire, at more than 347,000 acres, is the next largest.
Combined, they dwarf the Thomas fire, which at 281,893 acres shattered the records just three years ago.
“To have both of those going on at the same time ... gives us the magnitude of what has happened here in this state,” Sean Kavanaugh, incident commander on the LNU fire, said Sunday.
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