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Escape from Paradise

Fire resistant

CHICO, Calif. — Firefighters made progress Saturday against California’s largest wildfire of the year ahead of expected thunderstorms that could unleash fire-starting lightning and erratic winds and erode progress made over the past week. Dry, hot conditions posed similar threats across the fire-stricken West.

“We’re not completely out of the woods yet, but we’re looking very, very good,” CalFire official Mark Brunton said in a video update Saturday. “This is moving at a very fast pace.”

Containment of the Park Fire, now California’s fourth-largest wildfire on record, is at 27% as of early Saturday. Brunton said the relatively milder weather the last few days allowed firefighters to build containment lines.

But hotter weather, fuels and terrain will continue posing challenges for the estimated 6,500 firefighters battling the fire, which has spread over 626 square miles (1,621 square kilometers) since allegedly being started by arson in a park in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of the Sacramento Valley city of Chico. For comparison, the city of Los Angeles covers about 503 square miles (1,302 square kilometers).

Suppression crews will also start removing damaged infrastructure in some areas Saturday to allow residents to return home.

The fire originated at low elevations, where it quickly burned through thick grass and oaks, destroying at least 567 structures and damaging 51 so far. As it has climbed higher, the vegetation has changed to a greater concentration of trees and brush, Cal Fire said.

The fire’s push northward has brought it toward the rugged lava rock landscape surrounding Lassen Volcanic National Park, which has been closed because of the threat.

“There’s a lot of really steep drainages in that area,” CalFire spokesperson Devin Terrill said. “It takes a lot more time to access those areas.”

After a brief respite, firefighters are now bracing for treacherous conditions of hot and dry weather, along with expected thunderstorms with potential thunder strikes and gusty winds.

The collapse of thunderstorm clouds can blow wind in any and all directions, said Jonathan Pangburn, a fire behavior analyst with Cal Fire. “Even if there’s not lightning per se, it is very much a safety-watch-out environment for our firefighters out there,” Pangburn said.

The Park Fire is among almost 100 large fires burning across the western U.S. Evacuation orders were in effect for 28 of the fires, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Three wildfires burned in Colorado on Friday near heavily populated areas north and south of Denver, with about 50 structures damaged or destroyed, thousands of people under evacuation orders and human remains found in a destroyed house earlier this week.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office is investigating a blaze threatening hundreds of homes near the Colorado city of Littleton as arson.

Karlyn Tilley, a spokesperson for Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, said the investigation is ongoing and they are using a dog specially trained to sniff out sources and causes of fires. Tilley said just because they suspect the fire was human-caused doesn’t mean it was intentional.

Firefighters were making good progress on the fire despite the steep, rocky terrain and blistering heat, and no houses had been burned, officials said.

The cause and origin of a fatal blaze west of the town of Lyons was being probed by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, with specially trained fire investigators from the agency helping local authorities, agency spokesperson Crystal McCoy said. The area blackened by that fire remained relatively unchanged after it burned five houses.

The largest of the Colorado fires, west of Loveland, grew to 14.9 square miles (38.5 square kilometers) after previously burning 49 homes and other structures. Its cause is under investigation.

Scientists say extreme wildfires are becoming more common and destructive in the U.S. West and other parts of the world as climate change warms the planet and droughts become more severe.

Hi and welcome to the L.A. Times Politics newsletter. I’m Shelby Grad, deputy managing editor for news, filling in for David Lauter today.

A generational shift

Thirty years ago, the Los Angeles Times polled residents of Orange County about their attitudes on interracial dating and romantic relationships. The poll found young people were highly supportive, with nearly 60% of those ages 18 to 34 saying they had dated someone from another racial or ethnic group.

Orange County was just beginning to shed its image as a conservative white bastion, and the survey underscored big divides between the older generation and the younger.

“My boyfriend is Latino,” a white Fullerton bank teller told the paper. “I haven’t run up against any resistance from my parents, but my grandparents don’t like it.”

I was a young reporter in the newsroom when the poll came out, and I remember being impressed with the findings. And that sentiment came to represent the way a new generation of Californians defined their experience — with the belief that the mixing of races is not only our strength, but our secret weapon.

Today, nearly 16% of Californians identify as being of two or more races. And that includes the woman who is poised to be the Democratic presidential nominee.

A 78-year-old man’s recent comments questioning Kamala Harris’ multiracial identity could easily be written off as the outdated notion of earlier generations. But it was Donald Trump, and his words had a political purpose.

Trump falsely claimed that Harris “was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn, she became a Black person.”

The news cycle since his comments Wednesday during a session with three reporters at the annual convention of the National Assn. of Black Journalists has thoroughly discredited and dissected his words.

A California childhood

But perhaps it is more instructive to hear in Harris’ own words what it was like to grow up as a mixed-race Californian, born in Oakland to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father.

“My Indian mother knew she was raising two Black daughters,” Harris told The Times’ Michael Finnegan in 2019. “But that’s not to the exclusion of who I am in terms of my Indian heritage.

“I grew up going to a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple,” she explained.

She described a rich childhood of family visits to India and of Aretha Franklin’s gospel rendition of “Young, Gifted and Black“ as a soundtrack of her youth in a Black middle-class neighborhood in the flats of Berkeley.

Explaining identity to others

Harris went even deeper during an “Asian Enough” podcast interview with Frank Shyong and Jen Yamada in 2020. She talked about the challenges of explaining your identity to those unfamiliar with it.

“You’re required to explain things about yourself that otherwise you may not be required to explain. And that can be challenging for a number of reasons, including because you know, at that moment, you might prefer that the interview was about your plan for the economy,” she said with a laugh. “But you’re trying to help people figure out who you are even though you’re really comfortable in your own skin.”

Harris said she understood the need for voters — especially those never exposed to the diversity of her California — to get to know her.

“The challenge becomes, then, when you don’t fit in someone’s preconceived notion of who is president of the United States, because their only reference point is who has been president of the United States, and not one of those people looks like you, it presents a challenge,” she told Shyong and Yamada.

But Harris made a point of saying those struggles were never hers.

“I’ve never had an identity crisis,” she said, adding, “The frustration I have is that people think I should have gone through such a crisis and need to explain it.”

And she credited growing up in the Bay Area as one reason for that clear sense of identity : “There was such a cultural mix of people in the community. … It just wasn’t an issue for me.”

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Why California’s surge in immigration is lifting our economy
The exodus: Chevron, the oil giant born in California 145 years ago, is moving to Texas
The L.A. Times special: Tired of text spam from political fundraisers? Here’s what to do

Until next time,
Shelby Grad

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