NorCal facing wildfires more typically seen in the south
South Lake Tahoe firefighters on mop-up detail in Sonoma County. Photo/SLTFD
By Bettina Boxall, Los Angeles Times
Block after block of tidy housing tracts reduced to heaps of ash. Death counts in the double digits. Homeowners numbly poking through the ruins of domestic life.
California has seen this before.
But the harrowing images of loss and destruction usually come out of the south.
“These kinds of fires and the losses are very uncharacteristic of that part of the world,” University of California fire specialist Max Moritz said of the firestorm that ignited in Northern California last week, killing dozens of people and torching thousands of homes.
Until last week, 13 of the 20 most destructive — and 16 of the 20 deadliest — wildfires in modern state history occurred in Southern California.
