Th e Bul l eTin • SaTur day, a ug u ST 21, 2021 A3
TODAY
LOCAL, STATE & REGION
It’s Saturday, Aug. 21, the 233rd
day of 2021. There are 132 days
left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
In 1991, the hard-line coup
against Soviet President Mikhail
S. Gorbachev collapsed in the
face of a popular uprising led by
Russian Federation President
Boris N. Yeltsin.
In 1831, Nat Turner launched
a violent slave rebellion in
Virginia, resulting in the deaths
of at least 55 whites; scores of
Blacks were killed in retribution
in the aftermath of the rebellion.
Turner was later captured and
executed.
In 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s
“Mona Lisa” was stolen from the
Louvre Museum in Paris. (The
painting was recovered two
years later in Italy.)
In 1959, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower signed an executive
order making Hawaii the 50th
state.
In 1986, more than 1,700 people
died when toxic gas erupted
from a volcanic lake in the West
African nation of Cameroon.
In 1992, an 11-day siege began
at the cabin of white separatist
Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge,
Idaho, as government agents
tried to arrest Weaver for failing
to appear in court on charges
of selling two illegal sawed-off
shotguns; on the first day of the
siege, Weaver’s teenage son,
Samuel, and Deputy U.S. Mar-
shal William Degan were killed.
In 1993, in a serious setback for
NASA, engineers lost contact
with the Mars Observer space-
craft as it was about to reach
the red planet on a $980 million
mission.
In 2000, rescue efforts to reach
the sunken Russian nuclear sub-
marine Kursk ended with divers
announcing none of the 118
sailors had survived.
In 2013, an Army private now
known as Chelsea Manning was
sentenced at Fort Meade, Mary-
land, to up to 35 years in prison
for spilling an unprecedented
trove of government secrets.
The sentence for the former in-
telligence analyst was commut-
ed by President Barack Obama
in his final days in office.
In 2014, Gov. Jay Nixon ordered
the Missouri National Guard to
begin withdrawing from Fer-
guson, where nightly scenes of
unrest had erupted since a white
police officer fatally shot a Black
18-year-old nearly two weeks
earlier.
Ten years ago: Euphoric Libyan
rebels raced into Tripoli and took
control of the center with little
resistance as Moammar Gadha-
fi’s defenses collapsed and his
four-decade regime appeared to
be crumbling.
Five years ago: Shaking to
samba and sharing reflections in
uniquely Brazilian words, Olym-
pians and fans said goodbye to
the Rio Games with one last big
bash inside Maracana Stadium.
One year ago: Michigan’s ap-
peals court said Democratic Gov.
Gretchen Whitmer’s emergency
declarations and orders to curb
the coronavirus clearly fell with-
in the scope of her legal powers.
Today’s Birthdays: Actor-di-
rector Melvin Van Peebles is 89.
Rock-and-roll musician James
Burton is 82. Singer Jackie De-
Shannon is 80. College and Pro
Football Hall of Famer Willie
Lanier is 76. Actor Patty McCor-
mack is 76. Actor Loretta Devine
is 72. NBC newsman Harry Smith
is 70. Singer Glenn Hughes is 69.
Actor Kim Cattrall is 65. College
Football Hall of Famer and for-
mer NFL quarterback Jim McMa-
hon is 62. Actor Cleo King is 59.
Figure skater Josee Chouinard
is 52. Actor Carrie-Anne Moss is
51. Rock musician Liam Howlett
(Prodigy) is 50. Actor Alicia Witt
is 46. Singer Kelis is 42. Olympic
gold medal sprinter Usain Bolt
is 35. Actor Carlos Pratts is 35.
Actor-comedian Brooks Whee-
lan is 35. Country singer Kacey
Musgraves is 33. Actor Hayden
Panettiere is 32. Actor Maxim
Knight is 22.
CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES
THE WORST MAY BE AHEAD
BY BRIAN MELLEY
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — Smoke
from California’s wildfires
choked people on the East
Coast. Flames wiped out a gold
rush-era town. The acreage
burned would dwarf the state
of Rhode Island.
Images of homes engulfed in
flames and mountains glowing
like lava would make it easy to
conclude the Golden State is a
charred black landscape.
That’s hardly the case, but
the frightening reality is that
the worst may be yet to come.
California has already sur-
passed the acreage burned
at this point last year, which
ended up setting the record.
Now it’s entering a period
when powerful winds have of-
ten driven the deadliest blazes.
“Here we are — it’s not the
end of August and the size and
distribution and the destruc-
tion of summer 2021 wildfires
does not bode well for the next
months,” said Bill Deverell, a
University of Southern Cali-
fornia history professor who
teaches about fire in the West.
“The suggestion of patterns
across the last two decades in
the West is deeply unsettling
and worrisome: hotter, bigger,
more fires.”
More than a dozen large
wildfires are burning in Cali-
fornia grass, brush and forest
that is exceptionally dry from
two years of drought likely ex-
acerbated by climate change.
The fires, mainly in the
northern part of the state, have
burned more than 1 million
acres, or 2,000 square miles.
Firefighters are witnessing
extreme fire behavior as em-
bers carried miles by gusts are
igniting vegetation ripe for
burning in rugged landscapes,
where it’s hard to attack or
build a perimeter to prevent it
from spreading.
The Dixie Fire, the largest
currently burning and second
biggest on record, wiped out
the historic town of Green-
ville and continues to threaten
thousands of homes about 175
miles northeast of San Fran-
cisco. The Caldor Fire, burning
about 100 miles to the south,
blew up since Saturday, torched
parts of the hamlet of Grizzly
Flat and is chewing through
dense forest.
John Hawkins, a retired fire
chief for the state and now
wildland fire consultant, said
he’s never seen such explosive
fire behavior in 58 fire seasons.
A fire 50 years ago that
torched 100 homes and killed
Ethan Swope/AP
In a long-exposure photo, embers fly from burning trees Aug. 17 as the Caldor Fire grows on Mormom Emigrant Trail east of Sly Park, California.
two people near Yosemite Na-
tional Park once had the record
for fastest expansion, covering
nearly 31 square miles in two
hours. But that kind of spread is
becoming more common today.
‘Something has changed’
“The Harlow Fire of 1961
was one of a kind in its day,”
Hawkins said. “As we draw a
comparison today, it’s not one
of a kind; it’s one after another.
Something has changed.”
Hawkins said he saw simi-
larly rapid growth in the Cal-
dor Fire.
Dramatic time lapse video
showed a massive plume grow-
ing above thick forest. The col-
umn rose up and dark smoke
poured across the sky before
the cloud erupted in flames
shooting hundreds of feet in
the air.
“It wasn’t a slow deal,” Haw-
kins said. “When you see one
of those develop that fast in
heavy timber and already see
another dozen fires in Cali-
fornia running crazy it doesn’t
take much to light your light-
bulb or ring your bell.”
Ten of the state’s largest and
13 of the most destructive
wildfires in the top 20 have
burned in the last four years.
The largest of those fires, the
August Complex, a group of
lightning-sparked blazes that
merged, began a year ago this
week. The deadliest and most
— Associated Press
Check out our Cottages!
All the Amenities &
Conveniences of Home
& So Much More.
541-312-9690
2920 NE Conners Ave.
Bend, OR 97701
www.whisperingwinds.com
Call today to
schedule a tour!
destructive, the Camp Fire,
killed 85 and destroyed nearly
19,000 buildings in November
2018.
In the past, forest fires have
been dominant in late sum-
mer, and fires in the fall have
burned in chaparral and wood-
lands, driven by powerful dry
winds created by high pres-
sure over the Great Basin, said
Malcolm North, a researcher
with the U.S. Forest Service.
The offshore winds, known
as Diablos in Northern Califor-
nia and Santa Anas in South-
ern California, usually have
powered some of the worst
blazes as they sap vegetation of
moisture and pick up speed as
they squeeze through moun-
tain passes and canyons, be-
coming warmer and even drier.
Erratic infernos like the
Creek Fire last year, the
fifth-biggest ever, could be
blamed in part on a 2012-16
drought. It is estimated to have
killed more than 100 million
trees in the Sierra Nevada, the
state’s largest mountain range
and the setting for many of the
fires, North said.
North was co-author of a
2018 scientific paper that pre-
dicted Sierra wildfires could
burn at the intensity of blazes
lit by fire bombings in Dres-
den, Germany and Tokyo
during World War II.
“I do think that’s what we’re
seeing,” said North. “The cur-
rent models we have for how
fires are going to behave don’t
cover this because it’s just off
the charts. It’s hazardous to
firefighters and hard as hell to
predict what it’s going to do.”
North and others said they
worry about the firefighters
who have been working long
hours for over a month on the
Dixie Fire and move from one
blaze to the next.