© Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times
Sherpa Fire, Santa Ynez Mountains along the Gaviota Coast
“We’re running 400 to 500 fires a year. In the heat of summer, five or six a day—and most you’ll never see,” says CalFire chief Brian Estes.
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On the windy, hot day of July 26, 2018, as record 113-degree temperatures baked Redding, California, in the northern Sacramento Valley, Eric Knapp toiled in an air-conditioned government office. After work, he planned to meet his wife and 3-year-old daughter, and some family friends, for dinner. Slender and fair-skinned with a gentle smile,
Knapp is a research ecologist for the US Forest Service. He was well aware that, three days earlier, in coastal mountains west of town, a wildfire had started when a trailer got a flat tire and the metal wheel rim scraped the asphalt, sending sparks into dry brush.
Like the vast majority of wildfires, this one, called the
Carr Fire, burned initially as a wide but shallow band of flames advancing slowly, like a battalion of infantrymen marching shoulder to shoulder, and left behind charred grass and lightly scorched trees. The Carr Fire was
also typical in that it moved according to the dictates of wind, ground slope, and flammable fuels — southeast around a lake, then up a hill, in part because heat rises. Early on that particular morning, the fire had
crested a rise above Redding and, with a northwesterly breeze at its back, crawled downhill toward town.
Knapp was finishing up for the day when his friend Talitha Derksen, a wildlife biologist with a daughter close in age to Knapp's own, sent a text saying that her neighborhood might have to be evacuated. One of the agencies tasked with that judgment call, the
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection — aka CalFire — is one of the world's largest and most effective wildland firefighting organizations. CalFire bases evacuation recommendations on predictions of where, and how quickly, a flame front will move next. That day, the fire appeared likely to reach the floor of the Sacramento Valley at a subdivision called Land Park, about a mile northwest of Derksen's house.
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