Today, we’re starting with a dispatch from my colleague Thomas Fuller, who is based in the Bay Area:
Five months ago, we brought you the story of the rancher in Mendocino County who inadvertently started the largest wildfire in California history when he hammered a stake into a wasp’s nest.
I was surprised to learn last week that his home nearly burned — again — in the latest round of wind-driven fires in Northern California. Flames from the Burris fire, which was extinguished Nov. 3, scorched the sloping fields around the rancher’s wood-shingled home, coming very close to engulfing the wraparound porch.
“It took great effort on firefighters’ part to defend that structure this time,” said Tricia Austin, a fire prevention specialist with Cal Fire in Mendocino County. “Without the engine providing protection it very well could have been lost.”
Parts of California burn every year. And sometimes the very next year they burn again.
The Burris fire, which neighbors say ignited at or near a facility that makes compost, burned 703 acres and destroyed some sheds and minor structures but no homes.
Wildfire experts say fires frequently return to areas that have burned recently, underlining how no part of the state can let down its guard. The Kincade fire in Sonoma County, which forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate in October and was extinguished last week, burned through areas ravaged by the 2017 Tubbs fire and the 2015 Valley fire.
Ron Milliken lives across Highway 20 from the rancher, Glenn Kile, who started what became the Mendocino Complex fire in 2018, by far the largest the state’s history.
Milliken evacuated last year. And he evacuated again this year when the Burris fire ignited on the morning of Oct. 27.
It was 4 a.m. when he and his wife smelled smoke, but at least there was enough time to make a pot of coffee before they had to flee.
This article originally appeared in
.