By Ellen Wulfhorst
GEYSERVILLE, Calif., Nov 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Firefighter Joe Stewart steered his pickup truck through the redwood trees, pointing out charred remains of homes, barns and hunting cabins amid the blackened tree trunks and ashen soil of the latest wildfire.
With worsening waves of fires ravaging northern California, the loss of just hundreds of homes has come to signal success, he said.
The latest fire to scorch the area – the Kincade blaze in Sonoma County’s tourist-draw wine country, put to rest just days ago – burned nearly 80,000 acres (32,400 hectares) and destroyed more than 370 structures.
Several other fires burned to the south and to the north over the same period – and the Kincade blaze came just two years after a nearby spate of wind-driven wildfires north of the San Francisco Bay area killed 43 people.
Last year, 85 people died in another fire that swept into the northern California town of Paradise.
The persistent fires are dramatically shifting firefighters’ views of what’s possible in fighting them, said Stewart, a fire department captain in Geyserville, a tiny town at the edge of the grassy hills, redwood forests and vineyards where the blazes roared.
“We keep having these intense fires that are supposed to be once-in-a-lifetime fires, and now we’ve had five of them in the last couple years,” he said.
“You have 200 homes destroyed. Five years ago, that would have been crazy,” he said. “Losing 200 now was a win. It was a victory that no one died.
“It affects what we define as a success,” he said. “The next fire we might lose 500 homes and still say it’s a victory.”
