When a rapidly advancing wildfire began spreading across thousands of acres in Butte County, David Pittman remained calm.
He gathered his family, including their 90-pound African sulcata tortoise, and relocated to his sister’s house in Oroville, California.
Pittman plans to stay there for the next several days until firefighters can control the Thompson fire, which has destroyed several homes and vehicles and forced around 26,000 people, including Pittman, to evacuate.
“Unfortunately, we’re experienced with this kind of situation,” Pittman, 70, remarked on Wednesday.
Pittman, the mayor of Oroville, a small town in Northern California with Gold Rush origins, is situated near the state’s second-largest reservoir, about 65 miles north of Sacramento.
A retired local fire chief, Pittman has witnessed numerous calamities in the region in recent years.
In 2017, Oroville residents were ordered to evacuate when an emergency spillway at the nearby Oroville Dam threatened to flood the town.
The following year, in 2018, the Campfire, one of the deadliest wildfires in American history, killed 85 people and nearly destroyed the town of Paradise, about 20 miles north of Oroville.
In 2020, a record-breaking fire season scorched millions of acres across California, including areas within Oroville, Pittman recalled.
The Dixie fire in 2021, the second-largest fire ever recorded in California, burned an area larger than New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas combined. This fire was ignited by damaged PG&E power lines near the Feather River, which runs through Oroville.
Experts have indicated that these recurring disasters are symptoms of extreme climate fluctuations, which have caused the West to oscillate between severe floods and intense wildfires.
Climate scientists have warned that a hot summer in the West could dry out the vegetation that thrived during a wet winter, turning lush greenery into highly flammable tinder and creating a perilous fire season.
