California officials have requested help from three other states as its own firefighting resources fall short in tackling the hundreds of wildfires raging up and down the coast.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a press briefing Wednesday that he had called on Arizona, Nevada and Texas to provide 375 engines to the state as it races to contain nearly as many fires from Southern to Northern California — three of which have burned through more than 140,000 acres in the Bay Area region.
“We are experiencing fires the likes of which we haven’t seen in many, many years,” Newsom said. “The totality when you consider three hundred sixty-seven active fires we’re aware of all across California … that is a resource challenge where they are stretched in ways we haven’t seen in the last few years.”
Over the past month, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection or CAL FIRE rushed to hire and onboard 830 firefighters, out of an 858-person seasonal force the state approved through its recent budget negotiations, Newsom said. Historically, the state has relied on people who are incarcerated to fight wildfires — a pool of workers that COVID-19 has severely depleted.
But the past 72 hours proved that batch of firefighters wasn’t enough. After a request from California officials, Nevada and Arizona have sent crews and support, Newsom said, while the Texas governor just approved a similar request.
Even so, Newsom balked at the suggestion that the state could have been more prepared for the hard-to-beat blazes, which cropped up this week as a massive heat wave engulfed the West Coast and caused thousands of lightning strikes.
Newsom instead pointed out that the state pumped an additional $85 million into Cal Fire for permanent hires and has worked to procure more equipment in recent years — but that the extent of this year’s fires, which number more than 6,700 as opposed to just over 4,000 in 2019, is unprecedented in combination with the COVID-19 pandemic and rolling power blackouts.
“Many of these conditions — while they may be stacked up on each other — are familiar, and there are protocols, processes, procedures in place, and there is long-term thinking,” Newsom said.
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