A violent fire that has ravaged the Californian forest since Friday continued to spread on Sunday. Thousands of people were evacuated amid severe heat spikes affecting tens of millions of Americans across the United States.
The fire, dubbed the “Oak Fire,” sprawls across Mariposa County, near Yosemite National Park and its famous giant sequoias. It “has expanded significantly in the northern portion, moving further into the Sierra National Forest,” according to a Sunday bulletin from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Favored by “extreme drought”, winds and rising temperatures, the fire, fought by some 2,000 firefighters, burned at least 6,313 hectares of forest, destroyed 10 properties, damaged five others and threatened more than 2,500 , a spokeswoman for the department told AFP.
The fire is by no means contained and the heat, combined with low humidity, will “hinder” efforts to fight it, CAL FIRE said.
“Scary”
More than 6,000 people, mostly living in small high-altitude communities, had to evacuate on Saturday, according to another California fire department spokesperson, quoted by the Los Angeles Times newspaper.
“It was scary when we left, because we were getting ashes on us and we had such a vision of this cloud (of smoke). It looked like it was over our house and coming towards us very quickly,” Lynda Reynolds-Brown, a woman who had to leave her home, told local television channel KCRA 3.
