The hundreds of fires that have scorched California during the past two weeks have burned more than 520,000 acres. That already tops last year’s disastrous Southern California wildfires that burned 500,000 acres from Santa Barbara County to the Mexico border, which started Oct. 20 and burned until Nov. 9.

Hot weather, winds and a drought contributed to those fires, while this year’s wildfires in California’s remote and rugged terrain were started by unusual early-summer lightning storms that struck on June 20.

Already entrenched in an epic budget battle in Sacramento, state officials have had to dig deep to free up the money and resources to battle the blazes that have also brought federal support and financial aid from disaster declarations for several counties.

The Eureka Reporter takes a deeper look into how the fires, which some are already comparing to the worst fires in California’s history, are impacting residents financially and personally.

Plans for fire cost relief

In just two weeks time, the state of California has spent $100 million on resources for fighting the lightning fires that sparked on June 20 — compared to $300 million poured out for last year’s entire fire season.

It can be understandable, since the sizable chunk contributes to the cost of the 20,000 firefighters and their resources battling flames so far.

Although California is operating on an already-strained budget, the state saw some financial relief from the government recently when President Bush declared a state of emergency in Butte, Mendocino, Monterey, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Shasta and Trinity counties on June 28.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has recognized the financial burden fire protection has taken on the state and has been working to formulate an Emergency Response Initiative to raise funds for future disaster preparedness.

His plan was introduced in the May revision of the 2008-09 state budget and would require a tax on all residential and commercial property insurance state-wide.

The tax rate would fluctuate, depending on whether an area was considered “high-risk” for a natural disaster — such as a fire, earthquake or flood.

High-risk areas would be charged 1.40 percent — an average annual cost of $12.60 per household — and low-risk areas would be charged .75 percent, with an average annual cost of $6.75 per household.

State cabinet secretary Dan Dunmoyer said the Eureka area would be considered high-risk because of its frequent seismic activity.

“It’s a pretty limited expense,” he said. “For (about) a dollar a month, you can effectively raise $125 million a year for additional staffing and equipment.”

The governor’s initiative seeks to provide resources for peak fire season with 336 additional fire engines, 1,100 seasonal firefighters, 11 helicopters, provide CAL FIRE with GPS technology, and help strengthen the emergency response of the California National Guard.

Breaking down the numbers

Many of the firefighters battling blazes may be rookies, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the state is getting a bargain.

The equipment, training and salary costs for each firefighter vary — depending on years of experience, position and employer — but the U.S. Forest Service’s Brian Morris offered a perspective on how much it would cost to send one of their beginning firefighters out into the fire lines.

He said a beginning fireman’s equipment and training costs are estimated to be more than $3,500 — not counting the support firemen need once they get out on the field such as food, showers, toilets or even vehicles and aircraft.

Then, there are salary costs, whereas a beginner for the forest service starts out at $10 per hour, Morris said, and works up to 14-hour shifts for 14 days in a row.

Between regular and overtime pay, beginners working on the lightning fires could each be taking home more than $5,000 for their two weeks’ work, he said.

CAL FIRE and the forest service have joint agreements on which organization covers which area of land, but Morris said the forest service has primary responsibility for natural forest lands and CAL FIRE does for private and state lands.

The U.S. Forest Service crews have been working together with CAL FIRE and incident management teams from across the nation to combat fires and as their maximum work limits pass, some will be transitioning out for a couple days for some R&R.

No containment date for the lighting fires has been estimated yet and with the summer being far from over, many caution more fires and financial burdens could be on the way.

Preparing for the worst

Junction City Store clerk Linda Tillinghaft is ready to evacuate on a minute’s notice. After the thunderstorms and lightning hit Northern California the night of the summer solstice, she packed her car full of pictures and clothing for herself and her 17-year-old daughter. “We’re ready to pack up and leave if we have to,” she said on Thursday. “Just to be on the safe side, because that’s what’s more valuable to me, and to most people, the pictures.”

The wildfires that broke out following the storm that hit at the start of the summer have brought unhealthy levels of smoke, road closures and concern to residents living inland. “It was awful, you could see it, not where it was touching, but you knew it was,” Tillinghaft said. “But we didn’t get what they said we were going to get last weekend, so that was nice.”

The Siege of ‘08?

Many longtime residents may recall the last time lightning devastated local forests back in 1987, when fires that sparked across the Klamath National Forest became known as “Fire Siege ’87.”

Just two days after Labor Day in 1987, more than 11,000 lightning strikes sparked across the west, devastating nine states and hailed as the worst fires in nearly 100 years, according to Inciweb.

By the eighth week, 75 wildfires had burned a total of 258,764 acres — or 15 percent of the 1.7 million land base of the Klamath National Forest.

Bob Means, deputy incident commander for the current fires in the Ukonom complex, worked on the ‘87 fires and said there are a lot of similarities to the area’s current blazes.

Just the other day he worked on the Jake Fire and the Portuguese Fire within the same perimeter of the ‘87 Yellow Fire.

“I think this will go down as a memorable year here,” he said.

One thing he said that has changed since the ‘87 fires was that crews used to put lines up around every fire and continually lost them. Now, crews assess risk and value of different areas and put lines on places with more priority first, before sending out crews to lower-risk fires.

Retired firefighter Bill Gabbert also remembers fighting fires in the Shasta Trinity forest near Big Bar during the Siege of ‘87 and has gone on to dub the current fires “Siege of ‘08.”

He has been following the fires on his blog — wildfiretoday.blogspot.com — from his home in Hot Springs, S.D.

“It sounds like conditions are really similar,” he said, comparing the two fires. “In 1987, large areas in Northern California were completely filled with smoke for weeks at a time. It made it difficult to fly aircraft and firefighters were coming down with respiratory diseases and had hacking coughs, sometimes lasting for months.”

The differences Gabbert noticed were that the ’87 fires started in late August, whereas the fires currently burning started in late June — so early in the fire season that firefighters will still have another two months of fire season before they can expect cooler temperatures.

“There’s nothing in the favor of firefighters to help them put these fires out in the next two months or so,” he said.

Comparing recent fires

U.S. Forest Service fuels management specialist Lucy Salazar discusses other comparisons with more recent lighting induced fires.

More than 65 wildfires started between June 20 and June 21, Salazar said. Compare that to the 72 forests that broke out in 2007, and Northern California is way ahead of schedule. “These lightning events, it happens every once in a while, but this is unprecedented,” she said. “This could happen again next week or next month…and the weather service didn’t predict this, so people won’t have a lot of forewarning.”

Though these fires came earlier than is typical — later summer tends to bring more dryness and increased risk — they’re not as bad as past fires that have raged through forests.

“There’s still a lot of fuel to burn,” Salazar said. “We do get a lot of rain here, so there’s extreme density of fuel in the forests.”

The Megram-Onion fire of 1999 — the worst wildfire in recent years that burned about 140,000 acres in the Six Rivers National Forest, Shasta-Trinity National Forest and Hoopa Valley — was also started by lightning and caused the first air quality emergency in California. Hoopa residents were evacuated and the fires lasted from August to November, Salazar said.

“They’re much smaller than the large fires we’ve had in the past,” Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services coordinator Dan Larkin said of the current fires. “At the moment, they are not threatening habitable structures.”

The timeline for containment isn’t pretty, but it’s not unusual either. “Certainly we know some fire areas won’t be out until winter time, and that’s normal for some,” Larkin said. “But they are managed to a point where they are not in danger of growing.

“The issue right now is how early we are in the fire season,” he said. “We don’t see fires of this extent until later in the year, and that is cause for concern.”