Many of California’s largest wildfires have been started by dry lightning strikes
Federal officials described them as the “fires of hell,” a “holocaust” that blackened 775,000 acres of timber and chaparral and produced miles-high clouds resembling a nuclear bomb blast. It was the Siege of ’87, when two weeks of dry lightning strikes in late August and early September sparked thousands of wildfires in Northern California and Oregon, drawing an army of 19,000 firefighters. In 1999, hundreds of lightning-caused fires in the Big Sur region and the state’s north merged into two of the nation’s top blazes that year. During a 33-hour period in June of 2008, more than 5,000 lightning strikes ignited some 1,000 fires across Northern California, the Sierra Nevada and the Central Coast. This month’s explosion of lightning-sparked fires in the Bay Area will undoubtedly go down in the record books as the Siege of 2020. In the span of a week, some of them have merged together to form the second- and third- largest wildfires in modern state history. But big fires ignited by storms that streak the skies with thousands of lightning bolts are nothing new. Though California’s most destructive wildfires are often caused by people or equipment during high winds, many of the state’s largest recorded blazes have started with lightning strikes in the north or the Central Coast.
