York Fire mostly out, closures in place as crews battle remnants
The York Fire is mostly contained and mostly out, officials said Monday.
The once-huge wildfire, which erupted in the eastern part of California’s Mojave National Preserve on July 28 and crossed into Nevada near Searchlight, sending a thick haze of smoke north over Las Vegas on several days last week, is 93 percent contained, said a National Park Service spokesperson.
“The crews are addressing some hot spots but the only activity they’re seeing at this point is some smoldering in certain small areas, so there’s no real active fire,” said Sasha Travaglio, spokesperson for the multi-agency response to the York Fire.
The fire’s footprint spanned an area of just over 93,000 acres, or over 145 square miles, according to the Monday morning update on the federal government’s fire-tracking InciWeb site.
A fraction of the fire and its impacted area, about 9,127 acres, or about 14 square miles, was in Clark County on the Nevada side of the California state line, as of Monday.
Travaglio said the acreage amount used by officials refers to the area inside the fire’s perimeter that has burned, is burning, or is threatened with fire. It doesn’t mean that the entire acreage amount is fully engulfed in flames.
Officials have said the fire is expected to be fully contained by Aug. 14, but they’ve also said that could change. Its cause was still undetermined.
The blaze currently bears the largest footprint of wildfire-impacted area in the United States, according to InciWeb. Another fire, the Flat Fire, which has been burning in Oregon since July 15, was 32,266 acres, or over 50 square miles, on Monday. It was 39 percent contained.
“Desert fires often do spread pretty quickly because the fuels that are involved with many desert fires are smaller and burn faster,” Travaglio said.
As of today, August 7, the #YorkFire remains at 93,078 with 93% containment. Crews continue to patrol the fire. We will be reducing our update frequency due to the fire’s reduced activity. Please visit the York Fire InciWeb page for more information: https://t.co/nVI5ZyVlup pic.twitter.com/8vN0BYIrtj
— Mojave National Preserve (@MojaveNPS) August 7, 2023
On Saturday, the Mojave National Preserve’s Acting Superintendent, Kelby Kelly Fuhrmann, issued an official closure order for the area of the York Fire because of safety hazards but also to “allow fire management operations to continue unimpeded.”
Among the safety risks to visitors are fire-damaged trees, sinkholes and other road hazards, and hot ash.
Roads in the area of the fire were closed to all travel except people involved in the fire response and administrative duties until further notice, Furhmann’s announcement said.
The fire has stoked concerns about the Joshua trees in the preserve. While there have been areas of the preserve where the Joshua trees have been burned by the fire, “there are large, unburned areas of trees within the York Fire perimeter,” according to a post Sunday on the Mojave National Preserve’s Facebook page.
Travaglio said officials will assess the impact of the fire on the Joshua trees in the coming weeks.
In interviews with the Review-Journal last week, experts expressed worry that the massive wildfire will have forever altered the desert landscape and that the burned Joshua trees and other plant species will likely never recover.
Contact Brett Clarkson at bclarkson@reviewjournal.com.
