Californian wildfires—intensified by a fourth year of droughts—rage on as the state fire department strains to minimize damage.
“Firefighters continue to take action on the Valley,” reads the department’s incident report. It has deployed 2,362 fire personnel and 258 fire engines to fight the Valley fire as of today, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The Valley Fire in California has consumed 67,000 acres and 585 homes across Lake, Napa and Solano Counties as of Sept. 15, 2015 7:30 a.m., according to an incident report released by California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The fire department is pushing its limits as it attempts to contain a number of concurrent wildfires across the state. “We have multiple fires, so we’re all stretched thin,” said its Valley fire incident commander Robert Michael, wrote the Los Angeles Times.
The Valley Fire is only a close-up of a recurring problem in California. “Around 700,000 acres have burned this year in California, compared with about 500,000 in a typical year, and the fire season is nowhere near over,” said a state official, according to the New York Times.