SAN FRANCISCO — With hundreds of wildfires raging across remote, rugged parts of California for a second week, fire officials have been forced to strategically choose which to fight and which to leave to burn for weeks or even months.
The number of fires burning in central and Northern California — more than 1,000 according to state fire officials — means authorities can’t send firefighters to battle every blaze, Jason Kirchner, a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service, said Monday.
“It’s like eating an elephant — you’ve got to eat it one bite at a time,” he said.
It’s also impossible to attack wildfires in some rugged, remote areas because the risk to firefighters is too great, he said.
“We’ve got to pick the battles we can win.” Kirchner said.
What is extraordinary this year is the number of fires burning at the same time, Kirchner said. The weekend of June 21, about 1,200 fires were burning — a figure Forest Service officials said appeared to be an all-time record in California.
The Forest Service put the figure at about 600 on Monday. It attributed the gains to attacking small fires first, and to assistance from other states and Canada.
State officials, however, counted more than 1,000 ongoing blazes. The source of the discrepancy was apparently a different counting method.
Even so, firefighters managed to increase their containment of that 30,000-acre fire in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest from 15 to 23 percent.
Two wildfires choked parts of the Sierra Nevada foothills, sending up plumes of smoke that darkened the skies between Sacramento and Reno, Nev.
The fires in the Tahoe National Forest blanketed portions of the Interstate 80 corridor linking the two cities and the foothill communities in between where tens of thousands of people live.
Fire officials said fog and humidity helped them gain ground against a blaze that was just 3 percent contained in Big Sur. A spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service said it had blackened about 39,600 acres.
Firefighters poured personnel and equipment into the area to ensure the fire did not reach the town, said a spokesman for the Los Padres National Forest.
Wildfire information is available from the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services online at www.oes.ca.gov.
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