Fire crews guard giant sequoias against Garnet Fire

FRESNO COUNTY, Calif. (KSEE/KGPE) – The Garnet Fire slowed Wednesday night, lone increasing 209 acres - but adjacent its dilatory maturation is opening to endanger the elephantine sequoia trees successful the McKinley Grove.

“These trees are highly important and highly vulnerable,” Alaina Kuhlman with the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition said.

Kuhlman has dedicated her vocation to protecting the past trees.

“Both coastal redwood and elephantine sequoia forests are the 2 forests successful the satellite that store much c per acre than immoderate different forest,” Kuhlman said.

She says astir 20% of mature elephantine sequoias person died since 2015. The Garnet Fire continues to endanger that population.

“There inactive are a batch of blistery spots retired there. The ample fuels that downed logs, large branches, they're inactive precise dry,” wildfire spokesperson Joe Zwierzchowski said.

Officials accidental their superior concerns are for radical and towns, but they are besides doing everything they tin to defender the sequoias.

“We person a sprinkler strategy astir the trees. We're utilizing the jumpers to spell up into the trees erstwhile needed to assistance with the areas that are igniting,” wildfire spokesperson Shannon Colon said.

She says these are overmuch larger than the sprinkler systems successful residential lawns.

“The sprinklers are fundamentally acceptable up astir the bottommost of the basal of the histrion truthful that if the occurrence were to determination done that area, it's going to assistance to suppress it and propulsion it disconnected the tree. And the ground's already going to beryllium fundamentally prepped up of time,” Colon said.

So far, she says nary elephantine sequoias person caught fire, but flying embers person singed immoderate of their crowns.

“Some embers person lodged up into the branches of immoderate of the sequoias. But no, the trees person not caught fire,” Colon said.

Kuhlman says the sequoias’ crowns are their astir susceptible area. She says their little trunks are heavy and durable, but if their crowns were to afloat drawback fire, they could die.

Kulhman adds that McKinley Grove has not burned successful much than 100 years, starring to precocious levels of debris connected the crushed that crews had to rapidly cleanable up earlier the occurrence moved in.

“If we were capable to bash restoration enactment and wide that wood for debris and bash low-intensity burning up of a catastrophic wildfire, that wildfire would apt termination little monarch trees,” Kuhlman said.

Officials accidental they cannot acceptable up sprinkler systems astir each histrion successful the Sierra National Forest, but elephantine sequoias are not conscionable trees. They are portion of the atom of California’s ecosystem.