California Wildfires Now Also Lead to Evacuations Around Lake Tahoe Tourist Attraction
Tens of thousands of people are being evacuated from the tourist site around Lake Tahoe in the western United States. The west coast has been battling severe wildfires since July that have now destroyed thousands of square kilometres of forest.
The fire service in the northern US state of California is struggling to get this summer’s huge wildfires under control. However, that certainly does not apply to the “Caldor”, one of the biggest fires that have been raging for more than two weeks now and continues to rage.
That wildfire has also reached west and south of Lake Tahoe, one of the top tourist spots in the Sierra Nevada mountain range between California and Nevada. There, 750 square kilometres of forest, including 660 homes, have already gone up in flames.
Firefighters have now advised tens of thousands of people in and around the western and southern shores of the lake to leave, leading to significant traffic jams. Nearly 4,000 firefighters have been deployed to fight the blaze.
That Caldor isn’t even the worst of the wildfires. The largest, the “Dixie Fire”, has been raging since July and has already reduced more than 3,100 square kilometres of forest to ashes. In total, 15 large fires are raging on the west coast of the US.
