Mosquito fire grows past 50,000 acres in ‘historically dry’ brush as another blaze ignites west of Tahoe
Kern County Fire Information
Tahoe Meadows fire burning west of Tahoe River
Firefighters use chainsaws and hoses Tuesday to suppress a wildfire burning south of Squaw Valley Resort. The blaze is roughly 8,000 acres and firefighters expect it to continue to grow Wednesday.
By John MooreCNN
Tuesday, July 30, 2016
Tahoe Meadows fire burning southwest of Squaw Valley Resort, July 30, 2016. (John Moore, CNN)
Tahoe Meadows Fire
The fire burning southwest of Squaw Valley Resort has grown past the area’s most recent record-breaker.
An initial request for mutual aid from the U.S. Forest Service Tuesday afternoon found no response. That’s when the fire, which began at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, went to all-out and exploded more than 150 firefighters couldn’t put it down.
By Wednesday morning, it had grown to 50,000 acres (about 20 square miles), which the Forest Service officials said will be the largest stand of pine in the history of the Sierra Nevada.
“We are going to have to deal with the fire as it grows,” said Mike Zeglinski, a National Weather Service forecaster in Bishop, Calif. “It’s a fire of incredible age, and it’s going to have to grow over an area that’s several times as large as Tahoe Meadows.”
It began when a hiker found a fire burning in an open field on the west side of the Tahoe Meadows. The fire was initially reported at about 7:50 p.m. Tuesday when two Forest Service firefighters located it while on a hike.
A fire at the top of a mountain in California is growing by more than 2 million acres — the largest fire ever in the state.
By the time all the hiker’s were out of their tents, the fire was 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of the top of Mount Lassen and had grown to almost 1,600 acres (630 hectares) in less than an hour, said Mike Griggs, a Forest Service spokesman in Bishop.
So the Fire Protection Bureau