A pair of lightning-sparked wildfires in California’s Sierra Nevada have shuttered Sequoia National Park and are threatening its treasured gigantic trees, some of the largest on Earth.
The threat of flames from the KNP Complex led to the closing of the park and to evacuations of all park employees from facilities and nearby housing areas, Sequoia National Park announced Tuesday.
The KNP Complex, comprised of the Paradise Fire and the Colony Fire, grew to just over nine square miles late Tuesday, according to Cal Fire. While firefighters are “aggressively attacking these fires,” the park said, the wildfires are “still growing and have the potential to affect Sequoia National Park infrastructure and resources.”
Sequoia National Park is home to a forest of giant sequoias, the largest trees in the world, according to the National Park Service website. The giant sequoias, which grow along the west slope of the Sierra Nevada, can be as old as 3,400 years.
The KNP omplex started last week and is projected to plow toward the Giant Forest. The forest houses more than 2,000 giant sequoias, including the General Sherman Tree, which is the largest tree on Earth by volume, according to the National Park Service.
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“There’s no imminent threat to Giant Forest, but that is a potential,” Mark Ruggiero, fire information officer for Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, said at a Tuesday news conference, adding that the closest flames were about a mile from the Giant Forest.
With thick bark insulating them from heat injury and branches growing high enough to avoid flames, giant sequoias have adapted to live with fire for thousands of years, according to the NPS. In fact, the trees rely on the heat from fire to release seeds from cones.
But higher-severity fires have killed an “unprecedented number” of giant sequoias since 2015, according to the NPS.
“We have reached a tipping point — lack of frequent fire for the past century in most groves, combined with the impacts of a warming climate, have made some wildfires much more deadly for sequoias,” the NPS said.
Sequoia trees are “fire-adaptive” Ruggiero said Tuesday, “but when we get such intense fires even the sequoias can’t stand up to them.”
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Between 2015 and 2020, two-thirds of all giant sequoia grove acreage across the Sierra Nevada burned in wildfires, according to the NPS. Ruggiero said the 2020 Castle Fire destroyed 10% of the sequoia population. Some of the trees may have been as many as 2,000 to 3,000 years old.
“The unprecedented number of giant sequoias lost to fire last year serves as a call to action,” Clay Jordan, superintendent of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks said in July 2021, according to the NPS website.
Contributing: The Associated Press
Contact News Now Reporter Christine Fernando at cfernando@usatoday.com or follow her on Twitter at @christinetfern.
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