Firefighters start to contain raging California wildfire near Yosemite

• The Oak Fire has grown to 17,241 acres (6,977 hectares) by Monday night. It is 16 percent contained, up from 10% on Monday morning.
• Thousands of people remain evacuated from nearby Yosemite National Park.
• The National Weather Service predicts 100-degree temperatures for the rest of the week.

MARIPOSA, California (Reuters) – On Monday, firefighters began to control California’s largest wildfire this year, halting its eastward spread toward nearby Yosemite National Park while thousands of people remained evacuated.

The Oak Fire grew quickly after it started on Friday, overwhelming the initial firefighting effort, as extremely hot and dry weather fueled its galloping pace through dry forest and underbrush.

However, helicopters dropped 300,000 gallons (1.4 million litres) of water on the fire on Monday, according to a Monday night update from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

Cal Fire reported that the fire had grown to 17,241 acres (6,977 hectares) by Monday night, a 3 percent increase from Monday morning, and was now more than half the size of San Francisco.

It was now 16 percent contained, up from 10% on Monday morning, and 3,700 people had been evacuated.

The report contradicted comments made by several Cal Fire officials on Sunday, who said the fire initially behaved differently than any other they had seen and defied their best efforts to contain it, with burning embers sparking smaller fires up to two miles in front of the main conflagration.

Because there were no other major fires in the area, Cal Fire was able to focus 2,500 firefighters on the blaze, and the lack of wind allowed for the continuous use of aircraft to drop water and fire retardant, according to officials.

“It was a perfect storm in a good way,” Hector Vasquez, a Cal Fire spokesperson, said at the command post in Mariposa, California, about 150 miles inland from San Francisco.

The fire’s northward trajectory was taking it into the Sierra National Forest but no longer in the direction of Yosemite, which was about 10 miles away. A grove of Yosemite’s giant, ancient sequoia trees was threatened by another wildfire a few weeks ago.

Temperatures in the area reached 97 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius), while the few chances of thunderstorms faded. The National Weather Service predicts 100-degree temperatures for the rest of the week.

More than two decades of drought and rising temperatures have made California more vulnerable to wildfires than ever before, with the two most devastating years on record occurring in 2020 and 2021, when more than 6.8 million acres burned, an area larger than Rwanda.

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