Winds driving wildfire toward Lake Tahoe

Winds in California are driving a wildfire toward Lake Tahoe and the Nevada border as firefighters struggle to control the situation.

“With those winds, as it ran through the forest it created what’s called an active crown fire run, where the fire actually goes from treetop to treetop,” Stephen Vollmer, a fire behavior analyst for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said, The Associated Press reported.

The Caldor Fire has been burning for more than two weeks and continues to move toward Lake Tahoe and the Heavenly ski resort near the border with Nevada.

There were mandatory evacuations from South Lake Tahoe on Monday, with only a few individuals not heeding the warning, according to officials. 

There have been more than 15,000 firefighters battling the flames with more than 2,000 structures destroyed.

The fire made it into the Tahoe Basin, according to the AP, and Cal Fire Division Chief Erich Schwab on Tuesday said he was unsure how many homes were destroyed in the process.

“The fire burned through there extremely fast, extremely hot. And we did the best that we could,” Schwab said.

The ski resort’s snow-making machines were used to wet the slopes of the mountain to slow the fire down. 

The Caldor Fire is one of multiple big fires the West has had to battle this summer, with a destructive fire season that has destroyed thousands of structures and forced thousands of people to evacuate.