The year 2020 has been unpredictable, scary, and often frustrating! We want 2021 to arrive now! Soon at that! What with murder hornets, government UFO videos, and an ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, things have hardly been easy for the world. Just as we thought that we have seen it all, there comes another shocker of a threat, California’s firenadoes. Have you heard about that? No, Well, let’s find out here.
What are Firenadoes?
Videos on social media have captured the breathtakingly fearful sight, a towering column of smoke spinning over the Loyalton fire on Saturday, it is an event that scared the death of weather officials. Firenadoes, as stated by U.S National Weather Service in Reno is an extreme weather condition that results in rotating fire columns.
It’s officially the fire season in California and it is engulfing the surroundings with it’s towering blazes for several weeks. The weekend temperatures increased to triple digits in some specific areas. The formidable heatwave has led to wildfires spreading far and wide creating unusually abnormal weather. It results from increasing heat getting caught by changeable winds and pulls the flames, dirt, and smoke combining to make for a forbidding vortex.
The Cause of Firenadoes
The towering firenado has been all over social media and weather officials are coming up to explain why it has spread literally like wildfire. The high winds colliding with the Loyalton fire have set on fire about a hundred and seventeen square kilometers near Lake Tahoe. So much so that the blaze has led to a mass evacuation near the west of Reno, California-Nevada border.
The Impact!
The violent summer firenado has resulted in one of the hottest nights in California, in years. Firefighters spent all of the weekend, dousing the fumes to the best of their abilities. The community of Chilcoot had a tough and trying time dealing with the finicky and overwhelmingly powerful side of nature.
A thunderstorm made things worse helping stoke wildfires all over Northern California on Sunday and gusts of strong winds stoke the existing fire and stoked new ones. The gusts were speeding up to twenty-four kilometers per hour and pushed the fires towards the hillsides. Fire spokespersons revealed how they battled the wildfire. They set up a containment line right on the hilltops to stop the fire from spilling over to the other side, but the erratic speed made things difficult and laborious for them.
Rare, Devastating but Not Unheard Of
Have you ever heard of fire tornadoes? No?! Well, it is rare but not something you ever heard of. A July 2018 history near Redding, California repeats itself in August 2020 and it even killed a courageous fore fighter. The firenado was huge, when it reached its peak it was almost the size of three football fields put together.
The 2018 firenado was formed out and resulted in the spread of the fire. It might leave you in shock to know that the cloud was huge and reached twelve kilometers high above the sky. However, the most shocking part was to see it was topped with ice. This made it swirl and create a column gradually gathering strength forming a fire column that stretched and the winds stretched and moved like a tornado.
California is suffering the aftermath of a searing heatwave and officials had to create electricity blackouts. The temperature soared and recorded the highest temperature (54.4 Celcius) on a thermometer.
Loyalton Fire
The Loyalton fire has managed to cause widespread devastation creating havoc on 20,000 acres, all across the state. Frighteningly, there have been more than a dozen wildfires that are burning as we speak and out of the seven of them are massive. No wonder the temperature has soared in the past few days. With the temperature veering from uncomfortable to unbearable there is much at stake here.
So, it is best to stay alert and avoid sparks and avoid human-made fires. It certainly makes sense, we are nowhere nearing the end of 2020 and we are waiting in trepidation as to what else is there in store for us. Isn’t it terrifying? Well, at this point, all we can do is hope that the latter part of the year has something better to offer. We are not holding our breaths. But we hope that everything would fall into place soon and everything will go back to being normal.