The McKinney fire does a slow burn in the Klamath Forest near Yreka on Tuesday. Four separate times, columns of smoke rose from the flames beyond the altitude at which a typical jet flies, penetrating the stratosphere and injecting a plume of soot and ash miles above the Earth’s surface. It’s a phenomenon known as a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, a byproduct …
It was the perfect storm of factors for a deadly wildfire, experts say — extreme heat, dense and dry vegetation, and erratic winds and lightning brought on by persistent thunderstorms. As the 55,000-acre McKinney fire continued to burn in steep and difficult terrain in Klamath National Forest on Monday, emergency crews encountered increasingly grim evidence of the wildfire’s extraordinary and …
Joshua McKinney, 26, left, and Eric Hunt, 41, at Joshua’s grandmother’s home in Los Angeles. All it took was a bit of creative policymaking to please the firefighters’ union, a pandemic that has emptied prisons and fire camps alike, an early wildfire season that has already destroyed scores of homes in Northern California, an eye-popping unemployment rate, and nonstop protests …
