https://www.energy.gov/documents/doe-order-no-202-26-45

Cross posted from https://lemmy.wtf/post/49222727

A fast-growing wildfire destroying homes in northwest Reno, Nevada, on Sunday was human-caused and uncontained, authorities said, as they encouraged some 90,000 people to evacuate. At least six people were injured.

The Hawk Fire began Saturday and quickly grew to 20 square miles (53 sq. km.) as it spread across the Peavine Peak area of the Humboldt–Toiyabe National Forest, where rugged foothills are ringed by homes and businesses on the Nevada side of the California state line.

The fire moved exceptionally fast Saturday night, jumping over fire trucks and making it difficult for responders to get to hotspots while residents were trying to get out, Washoe County Sheriff Darin Balaam said.

“It was extremely confusing,” the sheriff said, describing how changing winds sent the flames in different directions.

Several structures were destroyed and the injured included three civilians and three first responders, officials said. They did not provide additional details on how the fire was started, saying it was under investigation. An unpredictable fire expands the danger zone

Some 42,000 residents have been ordered evacuated as the “GO NOW” zone expanded, reaching the edge of the University of Nevada at Reno. An additional 45,000 people were in the adjacent evacuation warning zone. Authorities implored all of them to leave and be prepared to stay away for several days, because shifting and strengthening winds were expected to make the fire even more unpredictable.

“Please get out if you can right now,” the sheriff said.

Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo declared a state of emergency in Washoe County, and mobilized the Nevada National Guard to support aerial firefighting with two helicopter crews as well as 60 troops to help police safeguard evacuated neighborhoods. Also responding were 800 fire personnel.

Nearly 10,000 customers were without power in Washoe County on Sunday, down from 60,000 on Saturday. Portions of U.S. Route 395, a major north-south highway, were closed due to the fire. Reno, with more than 280,000 residents, is the largest city in Nevada outside of metro Las Vegas.

Washoe County emergency officials opened the Reno-Sparks Convention Center to evacuees, but said they couldn’t bring their pets — small animals and large animals were to be left at two other locations. Casinos in Reno offered discounts on hotel rooms to evacuees.

A family raced to grab possessions but lost their home

Cari Kieffer said a video posted on social media showed her house entirely burned down, with only a scorched basketball hoop still standing.

“I woke up this morning and just started crying — all my kids, they lost everything,” Kieffer said Sunday. “We lost all our stuff. Everything we own is gone.”

Kieffer had been watching her son’s football game Saturday when she learned that their home on the outskirts of Reno was in the evacuation zone. An application the family used to track the fire’s progress had been lagging significantly behind its actual location, she said, so they thought firefighters had kept the blaze from their neighborhood.

Instead, Kieffer, her husband and their four children ages 3 to 16 raced to save their dogs and whatever possessions they could retrieve. Ash rained down and the wind blew like an oven blast from a wall of flames advancing down the hillside toward their neighborhood, she said.

“I kept looking outside and the flames just kept getting closer and closer every time I looked,” Kieffer said. “I was like, we gotta go like now.”

Eyes watering and throat burning, Kieffer grabbed a handful of clothes, a Bible, her wedding photos and her mother’s ashes. In the frenzy, as firefighters yelled at her family to leave immediately, she said she forgot her family’s birth certificates and was unable to salvage her childhood photos.

The family drove to a friend’s home but had to evacuate again. They learned later Saturday evening that their own home was gone. A mountaintop home goes up in flames

Jaida Hargrove’s grandfather, Rick Arrate, lived alone on Peavine Mountain, which overlooks Reno and Sparks. Firefighters used a bulldozer, cut down trees and applied fire removedant in their attempt to contain the flames, Hargrove said.

“They all thought it would be OK,” she said. “And then, in about 30 minutes, the winds just changed and it came way too fast.”

Arrate and the firefighters were quickly forced off the mountain. “All he was able to take with him was his two golden retrievers,” Hargrove said.

Arrate spent Saturday night with Hargrove’s parents, his next steps unknown.

Separate GoFundMe crowdfunding campaigns were set up to assist Arrate and the Kieffer family. The fire wasn’t troubling to some at first

The fire was so small Saturday morning that it wasn’t even a concern, said Tyler Duvall, who went camping over the weekend. By the next day, his house was in the evacuation zone and he couldn’t get back.

“The wind really blew it up,” Duvall said, adding that he knows of some homes that burned about a mile from his place.

Strong, gusty winds, low humidity and dry vegetation are fueling its growth, according to Truckee Meadows Fire & Rescue in Reno. A Nevada transplant gets a rude welcome to Reno

Retired police officer and firefighter Ted Melden has seen his share of Mother Nature’s fury since moving to Reno with his wife earlier this month from Chapin, South Carolina. So far, he’s experienced a hailstorm with flash flooding, two different power outages and, now, the second wildfire incident in the region in two weeks.

“Just another natural disaster,” Melden said.

In the two years he lived in South Carolina, Melden said Hurricane Helene knocked over trees in his yard, while a tornado did some damage in his neighborhood.

For now, Melden hasn’t been ordered to leave his home, but he has his bags packed just in case.

“This thing kicked off yesterday, and it just went,” Melden said in describing the wildfire’s fast movement. “I’m hoping they’ll get a good handle on it. You just have to roll with the flow and be ready. Always be prepared and have a full tank of gas.” Places just outside the evacuation zone are warned

The University of Nevada’s Reno campus, where many of the 20,000 undergraduates moved into their housing this weekend, was just outside the evacuation zone Sunday. University leaders said they were actively monitoring the fire and have an evacuation plan prepared if needed.

Authorities also were keeping watch on a county jail several blocks from the outer edge of the evacuation warning area.

Earlier this month, three wildfires fueled by hot, dry and windy conditions north of Reno forced more than 13,000 residents from their homes, according to the Nevada National Guard. The largest of the three, the Bug Fire, burned nearly 150 square miles (390 sq. km.) but now is almost fully contained.

Firefighters and residents of south Lebanon have accused the Israeli military of lighting wildfires in the region, as forested areas burned down in blazes sparked by Israeli bombing.

Environmental groups said the fires in recent weeks were part of a longstanding Israeli practice of targeting Lebanon’s natural environment.

On Tuesday, the Israeli military dropped flares in a wooded area outside Khiam, in south Lebanon, sparking blazes. When firefighters attempted to extinguish the flames, a drone struck close by, forcing them to withdraw, said the head of the civil defence in the Nabatieh region, Hussein Fakih.

“Most of our missions are now related to fires,” Fakih said. “There are enormous areas of woodland that have burned, I don’t have the exact figures, but in the areas close to the [frontline], around 30-40% of the land has been affected by fires.”

The Israeli military has caused fires across south Lebanon, in particular in olive groves and on agricultural land, according to videos and testimony from emergency services, in the nearly two-months since the 17 June ceasefire that mostly ended fighting between Hezbollah and Israel.

“They started doing this right after the ceasefire, and there have been incendiary bombs every day,” Fakih said. “Small drones come out and drop incendiary materials, [white] phosphorus shells are fired at the woodlands, in addition to illumination flares that they drop during the daytime so the vegetation catches fire.”

Firefighters and residents of other areas in south Lebanon describe similar blazes being started by Israeli munitions and drones in dry scrub and woodlands. On Friday, Israeli munitions created large wildfires in two heavily forested areas, in Kfarchouba, close to the border, and between Jezzine and the western Bekaa valley.

The civil defence station chief in the area, Samir Hardan, said a fire was started near Kfarchouba on Friday afternoon after a drone dropped a munition in woodlands. After battling blazes overnight and extinguishing them on Saturday, a second drone started another fire on Sunday, Hardan said.

Firefighters are required to coordinate their movements with the Lebanese army, which relays their request to a “deconfliction” group that includes the Israeli military. They were given permission to fight the fires at only two spots, and not other areas where fires were raging.

According to environmental groups, the fires are part of a pattern of Israeli attacks against Lebanon’s environment that threaten the country’s woodlands and the biodiversity they support.

Hisham Younes, the founder of Green Southerners, a Lebanese conservation organisation, said: “These are long-established woodlands, dominated by productive stone pine alongside oak. They perform critical functions. The wider area is also an important passage and resting ground for migratory birds.”

Younes called the Israeli attacks an ecocide. “It is not about any single fire or attack, but a pattern of destruction that progressively erodes the ability of ecosystems to function, regenerate and sustain life. When those cascading effects also undermine livelihoods and people’s ability to return to and remain on their land, environmental destruction becomes inseparable from the wider transformation of the territory itself.”

Since fighting started on 8 October 2023 when Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel in solidarity with the Hamas-led attack a day earlier, Israel has repeatedly targeted Lebanon’s woodlands.

The Israeli military has said in the past that Hezbollah used these forested areas as cover for its fighters and its tunnels.

Ecologists and rights groups have said fires and other forms of widespread environmental destruction will have wider effects on civilian populations.

Asked for comment on each of the recent wildfire incidents, the Israeli military said its operations were “conducted while taking precautionary measures to mitigate harm to civilians and the environment”.

It is not the first time Israeli forces have been reported to have set fires deliberately. In the summer of 2024, Israeli troops used trebuchets – medieval catapults – to fling flaming debris over its border wall with Lebanon, while the Lebanese army published photos of Israeli drones that carried hoses that doused forests in flammable materials.

Health and environmental experts raised the alarm in February when Israeli planes dropped herbicides linked to cancer on farms in south Lebanon.

Besides the environmental and health consequences of these fires, residents of south Lebanon have mourned the loss of the green spaces in the villages where they grew up.

On 1 August, displaced residents of the border village of Yaroun found their olive and fruit groves, as well as their homes, had been set ablaze by occupying Israeli troops. People living in the nearby Christian towns of Rmeich and Aïn Ebel, among the few villages near the border not emptied out by the Israeli military, sent pictures of the fires.

Hafez Ghasham, the mayor of Yaroun, said: “They had already bulldozed the whole village. Then they set fire to the trees. What remained in this particular area were the olive trees – large groves, with very old olive trees. They started there, then the fire spread along the outskirts of the village.”

People in Yaroun had already watched in previous months as all but 20 of the 900 houses in the village were bulldozed by the Israeli military. They pooled resources to buy expensive satellite imagery of the village during their displacement.

Ghasham said: “Many of these trees, most of them, in fact, were inherited from our grandparents and parents. They have enormous sentimental value. The trees were also an important source of income for the people of the village.

“They are trying to make the land uninhabitable. They are erasing our entire history, our entire culture, all our memories. Maybe the idea is that after some time, it will look as though nobody had ever lived here.”

He said most of the suspects were accused of deliberately burning land to clear areas for plantations at lower cost.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesian police on Sunday arrested 72 people suspected of starting some of the recent forest and peatland fires as huge blazes in central and western parts of the country triggered a harmful cloud known as a choking haze.

Indonesia has been battling fires driven by an intensifying El Nino pattern and a prolonged dry season, generating dense smoke that crossed into Malaysia, according to Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency, or BNPB.

Fires are a regular problem in the country and often strain relations with neighbors.

Plantation owners and traditional farmers often start fires to clear land for farming, said Mohammad Irhamni, director of special crimes at the National Police’s Criminal Investigation Agency.

The arson suspects were being investigated in connection with 89 forest and land fire cases across five provinces on the island of Borneo and four on Sumatra, Irhamni said.

He said most of the suspects were accused of deliberately burning land to clear areas for plantations at lower cost. Investigators were still tracing financial records to determine whether companies financed or ordered the land clearing, signaling the probe could expand beyond those arrested.

“We will not stop at the perpetrators on the ground,” Irhami said in a news conference Sunday in the capital, Jakarta. “We will determine who benefited from these activities and who was ultimately behind them.”

The suspects face charges that carry penalties ranging from hefty fines to prison terms of up to 15 years, he said.

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto flew on Saturday to Central Kalimantan province, where more than 7,600 hectares (18,700 acres) have burned, to encourage authorities to get the haze cloud under control.

Prabowo promised government resources required to contain the fires, including helicopters and water pumps, and vowed to hold accountable any companies found to have contributed to the fires.

“I hope we can control this soon,” Prabowo said during the visit. “We have experienced worse forest and land fires in the past, and we were able to overcome them.”

Accompanying the president was Prasetyo Hadi, the head of State Secretariat. He said at least four companies in West Kalimantan province are under investigation for allegedly using fire to clear land. If they are proven to have intentionally set the fires, they could face sanctions, including the revocation of their operating permits, he added.

Smoke from the fires on Sunday blanketed parts of Borneo, the world’s third-largest island shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. Indonesia administers about three-quarters of the island, where the country’s Environment Ministry recorded more than 3,700 hot spots on Sunday.

BNPB chief Suharyanto said fire activity had increased in West, Central and South Kalimantan provinces on Borneo, where many blazes worsen due to peatlands, prolonging the dangerous haze in several areas.

Fires that appear “extinguished on the surface may still contain embers underneath, so sufficient rainfall is crucial to rewet the peat and fully suppress the fires,” said Suharyanto, who, like many Indonesians, uses a single name.

The western island of South Sumatra also battled fires, with more than 1,700 hot spots detected on Sunday, causing a choked haze cloud and reducing visibility to only 10 meters (33 feet) in some areas, the ministry said.

Cloud-seeding resumed over Kalimantan on Sunday, with 30 helicopters for water-bombing and aerial patrol missions, and another 22 helicopters covering Sumatra.

Meanwhile, Malaysia has suffered severe smoke from the fires, with its eastern state of Sarawak among the hardest hit. One district recorded “very unhealthy” air quality on Friday, while eight others posted unhealthy readings, prompting the closure of nearly 600 schools and affecting about 200,000 students, the Sarawak government said.