AFP UK

With executives from the Detroit automakers watching, President Joe Biden on Thursday announced a target for half of all cars sold in the United States to be zero-emission vehicles by 2030.

Biden cast the move as a way to compete with China and other countries that have invested in electric vehicles (EV), while also transforming the US transportation sector, which is the biggest source of the country’s carbon emissions.

Speaking at the White House before an array of electric cars, Biden called them “a vision of the future that is now beginning to happen, a future of the automobile industry that is electric, battery electric, plug-in hybrid electric, fuel cell electric.”

“It’s electric and there’s no turning back. The question is whether we’ll lead or fall behind,” he said.

News of the announcement drew modest praise from environmentalists, who stressed the need for additional measures given the worsening climate situation.

The Sierra Club’s Katherine Garcia called the target a “meaningful signal to manufacturers,” but said it should be raised to 60 percent and be supplemented with “the strongest clean car standards possible.”

Significantly increasing US usage of electric vehicles — which accounted for only about two percent of 2020 car sales — is expected to depend on expanding charging stations and other infrastructure, as well as convincing Americans to buy the cars.

The “Big 3” US automakers — General Motors, Ford and Stellantis — have all significantly expanded their EV investments, making the target “most likely achievable” by 2030, Jessica Caldwell of auto website Edmunds.com said.

“But what’s possibly the biggest hurdle ahead is consumer acceptance: What will it take for Americans to be willing to change their car ownership habits to go electric?” Caldwell said.

– Infrastructure debate –

In a joint statement, the Detroit manufacturers expressed their “shared aspiration to achieve sales of 40-50 percent” of the vehicles, but said the shift “can be achieved only” with initiatives such as consumer incentives to buy EVs and new infrastructure like a charging network.

While Biden has proposed an infrastructure plan that would include many of those programs, not all have made it into the Senate’s bipartisan compromise bill viewed as having the best chance of passing in Congress.

The United Auto Workers (UAW), one of the country’s largest auto worker unions, rallied behind the move. 

“The members of the UAW, current and future, are ready to build these electric cars and trucks and the batteries that go in them,” President Ray Curry said in a statement released by the Biden administration.

Left out of the Washington launch event was Tesla, Elon Musk’s company that has been credited with accelerating the popularity of EVs in the United States and leads in domestic sales.

Musk has however been criticized for tactics seen as anti-union, and White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the companies invited to the White House “are the three largest key players of the United Auto Workers.”

“Yeah, seems odd that Tesla wasn’t invited,” Elon Musk tweeted.

– Measured praise –

Although the 50 percent figure would not exceed what many American manufacturers were already considering, it is a steep target for the United States as a whole.

While around 10 percent of European car sales are of EVs, they account for less than two percent in the United States, the International Energy Agency said last year.

Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp praised the announcement as positioning the United States to compete in the emerging transportation economy.

“Countries around the world are racing to eliminate pollution from their cars and trucks,” Krupp said. 

Americans, he added, “can win this race, and our prize will be good jobs, savings at the gas pump for American families, cleaner air and a safer climate.”

But the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Simon Mui said more aggressive action was needed immediately “given how climate change has already turned our weather so violent.”

The target is Biden’s latest repudiation of the policies of his predecessor Donald Trump, and he also intends to beef up fuel economy rules and emissions regulations the former president rolled back.

Current emissions standards, which date from March 2020, require manufacturers to improve by 1.5 percent the energy efficiency of their vehicles between 2021 and 2026, less than the five percent demanded under Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama.

After flying its founder Richard Branson to space, Virgin Galactic is restarting ticket sales beginning at $450,000, the company announced Thursday.

The new price is about double the $200,000 to $250,000 paid by around 600 people who previously booked seats on Virgin’s spaceship between 2005 and 2014, as the company looks to cash in on the success of last month’s fully-crewed test flight.

“We are excited to announce the reopening of sales effective today,” said CEO Michael Colglazier in a statement, with first dibs going to people on a waiting list.

“As we endeavor to bring the wonder of space to a broad global population, we are delighted to open the door to an entirely new industry and consumer experience.”

On July 11, Branson beat Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos to space in a battle between the billionaires. Bezos achieved the feat nine days later.

The next test flight will come in September and involve members of the Italian Air Force.

There will be one further test after the September mission, then the first commercial flights will take place in the third quarter of 2022, Colglazier said in an earnings call.

The offerings for customers will include a single seat; multi-seats for couples, friends or family; and a full-flight buyout.

Two free seats on an early flight are up for grabs in a prize draw, with registrations open until September 1.

The spaceplane was originally designed to carry six crew, but last month’s flight, which was described as “fully-crewed,” had just four — suggesting this is the current number.

Virgin’s space experience involves an air-launched spaceplane, VSS Unity, that takes off attached to the belly of a massive carrier plane from a runway at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

After gaining altitude, the spaceplane detaches from its mothership and ignites its rocket engine, ascending to beyond 50 miles (80 kilometers) above sea level. 

Passengers unbuckle and experience a few minutes of weightlessness before the plane glides back to the runway to land.

The company has come under fire for its carbon footprint, which is roughly equivalent to a transatlantic flight but for far fewer people. It has said it is examining the possibility of offsetting its emissions.

“Our long term objective is to offer a near-daily cadence of space flights, and not just from New Mexico, but from multiple locations around the world,” CFO Doug Ahrens said during the call.

After flying its founder Richard Branson to space, Virgin Galactic is restarting ticket sales beginning at $450,000, the company announced Thursday.

The new price is about double the $200,000 to $250,000 paid by around 600 people who previously booked seats on Virgin’s spaceship between 2005 and 2014, as the company looks to cash in on the success of last month’s fully-crewed test flight.

“We are excited to announce the reopening of sales effective today,” said CEO Michael Colglazier in a statement, with first dibs going to people on a waiting list.

“As we endeavor to bring the wonder of space to a broad global population, we are delighted to open the door to an entirely new industry and consumer experience.”

On July 11, Branson beat Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos to space in a battle between the billionaires. Bezos achieved the feat nine days later.

The next test flight will come in September and involve members of the Italian Air Force.

There will be one further test after the September mission, then the first commercial flights will take place in the third quarter of 2022, Colglazier said in an earnings call.

The offerings for customers will include a single seat; multi-seats for couples, friends or family; and a full-flight buyout.

Two free seats on an early flight are up for grabs in a prize draw, with registrations open until September 1.

The spaceplane was originally designed to carry six crew, but last month’s flight, which was described as “fully-crewed,” had just four — suggesting this is the current number.

Virgin’s space experience involves an air-launched spaceplane, VSS Unity, that takes off attached to the belly of a massive carrier plane from a runway at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

After gaining altitude, the spaceplane detaches from its mothership and ignites its rocket engine, ascending to beyond 50 miles (80 kilometers) above sea level. 

Passengers unbuckle and experience a few minutes of weightlessness before the plane glides back to the runway to land.

The company has come under fire for its carbon footprint, which is roughly equivalent to a transatlantic flight but for far fewer people. It has said it is examining the possibility of offsetting its emissions.

“Our long term objective is to offer a near-daily cadence of space flights, and not just from New Mexico, but from multiple locations around the world,” CFO Doug Ahrens said during the call.

After flying its founder Richard Branson to space, Virgin Galactic is restarting ticket sales beginning at $450,000, the company announced Thursday.

The new price is about double the $200,000 to $250,000 paid by around 600 people who previously booked seats on Virgin’s spaceship, as the company looks to cash in on the success of last month’s fully-crewed test flight.

Its next flight will come in September and involve members of the Italian Air Force, a paying customer.

“We are excited to announce the reopening of sales effective today,” said CEO Michael Colglazier in a statement, with first dibs going to people on a waiting list.

“As we endeavor to bring the wonder of space to a broad global population, we are delighted to open the door to an entirely new industry and consumer experience.”

In July, Branson beat Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos to space in a battle between the billionaires.

There will be one further test after the September mission, but after that their calendar for launches has not been revealed.

The offerings for customers will include a single seat; multi-seats for couples, friends or family; and a full-flight buyout.

The spaceplane was originally designed to carry six crew, but last month’s flight, which was described as “fully-crewed,” had just four — suggesting this is the current number.

The company has predicted it will eventually run up to 400 flights per year, and two seats are up for grabs in a prize draw, with registrations open until September 1.

Virgin’s space experience involves an air-launched spaceplane, VSS Unity, that takes off attached to the belly of a massive carrier plane from a runway at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

After gaining altitude, the spaceplane detaches from its mothership and ignites its rocket engine, ascending to beyond 50 miles (80 kilometers) above sea level. 

Passengers unbuckle and experience a few minutes of weightlessness before the plane glides back to the runway to land.

The company has come under fire for its carbon footprint, which is roughly equivalent to a transatlantic flight but for far fewer people. It has said it is examining the possibility of offsetting its emissions.

With executives from the Detroit automakers watching, President Joe Biden on Thursday announced a target for half of all cars sold in the United States to be zero-emission vehicles by 2030.

Biden cast the move as a way to compete with China and other countries that have invested in electric vehicles (EV), while also transforming the US transportation sector, which is the biggest source of the country’s carbon emissions.

Speaking at the White House before an array of electric cars, Biden called them “a vision of the future that is now beginning to happen, a future of the automobile industry that is electric, battery electric, plug-in hybrid electric, fuel cell electric.”

“It’s electric and there’s no turning back. The question is whether we’ll lead or fall behind,” he said.

News of the announcement drew modest praise from environmentalists, who stressed the need for additional measures given the worsening climate situation.

The Sierra Club’s Katherine Garcia called the target a “meaningful signal to manufacturers,” but said it should be raised to 60 percent and be supplemented with “the strongest clean car standards possible.”

Significantly increasing US usage of electric vehicles — which accounted for only about two percent of 2020 car sales — is expected to depend on expanding charging stations and other infrastructure, as well as convincing Americans to buy the cars.

The “Big 3” US automakers — General Motors, Ford and Stellantis — have all significantly expanded their EV investments, making the target “most likely achievable” by 2030, Jessica Caldwell of auto website Edmunds.com said.

“But what’s possibly the biggest hurdle ahead is consumer acceptance: What will it take for Americans to be willing to change their car ownership habits to go electric?” Caldwell said.

– Infrastructure debate –

In a joint statement, the Detroit manufacturers expressed their “shared aspiration to achieve sales of 40-50 percent” of the vehicles, but said the shift “can be achieved only” with initiatives such as consumer incentives to buy EVs and new infrastructure like a charging network.

While Biden has proposed an infrastructure plan that would include many of those programs, not all have made it into the Senate’s bipartisan compromise bill viewed as having the best chance of passing in Congress.

The United Auto Workers (UAW), one of the country’s largest auto worker unions, rallied behind the move. 

“The members of the UAW, current and future, are ready to build these electric cars and trucks and the batteries that go in them,” President Ray Curry said in a statement released by the Biden administration.

Left out of the Washington launch event was Tesla, Elon Musk’s company that has been credited with accelerating the popularity of EVs in the United States and leads in domestic sales.

Musk has however been criticized for tactics seen as anti-union, and White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the companies invited to the White House “are the three largest key players of the United Auto Workers.”

“Yeah, seems odd that Tesla wasn’t invited,” Elon Musk tweeted.

– Measured praise –

Although the 50 percent figure would not exceed what many American manufacturers were already considering, it is a steep target for the United States as a whole.

While around 10 percent of European car sales are of EVs, they account for less than two percent in the United States, the International Energy Agency said last year.

Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp praised the announcement as positioning the United States to compete in the emerging transportation economy.

“Countries around the world are racing to eliminate pollution from their cars and trucks,” Krupp said. 

Americans, he added, “can win this race, and our prize will be good jobs, savings at the gas pump for American families, cleaner air and a safer climate.”

But the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Simon Mui said more aggressive action was needed immediately “given how climate change has already turned our weather so violent.”

The target is Biden’s latest repudiation of the policies of his predecessor Donald Trump, and he also intends to beef up fuel economy rules and emissions regulations the former president rolled back.

Current emissions standards, which date from March 2020, require manufacturers to improve by 1.5 percent the energy efficiency of their vehicles between 2021 and 2026, less than the five percent demanded under Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama.

The largest wildfire in California has razed a small town, warping street lights and destroying historic buildings hours after residents were ordered to flee. 

Greenville, an Indian Valley settlement of a few hundred people dating back to the mid-1800s Gold Rush, was engulfed by flames as winds whipped the inferno towards the community, turning the sky orange.

“I’d say the majority of downtown Greenville is completely destroyed,” tweeted wildfire photographer Stuart Palley, sharing images of the devastation. 

“My heart is broken for this beautiful little town.”

The Dixie Fire has been raging in the dry forests of northern California since mid-July, part of a global warming climate crisis that has brought sweltering heat and an alarming drought to much of the western United States.

Authorities had earlier issued evacuation alerts to residents, as high winds fanned the fire to around 500 square miles (1,300 square kilometers).

Almost a fifth of that area was added overnight.

The blaze is so big that it has been generating its own weather system.

“We did everything we could,” California fire department spokesman Mitch Matlow told reporters. “Sometimes it’s just not enough.”

Images taken by an AFP photographer showed the fire’s heat had bent street lights to the ground, with only a few structures still standing.

A gas station, a hotel and a bar were destroyed, as well as many buildings that were more than a century old.

The fire swept through the town on Wednesday afternoon, where the impact was devastating, said Jake Cagle, incident management team operations section chief.

He said firefighters were struggling with those not obeying evacuation orders, leading to their having to divert time and resources to rescue people in the path of the flames, even as they tried to deal with an extraordinary blaze. 

“We have firefighters who are getting guns pulled out on them, because people don’t want to evacuate,” he said Thursday.

“It was a very tough day for all of our resources — there’s stuff out there that we didn’t want to see,” said Cagle.

– ‘Explosively’ –

Almost 5,000 personnel are involved in the battle to tame the blaze, which is now the sixth-worst in the state’s history, according to the California fire department.

But very low humidity and a parched landscape were offering ideal conditions for the fire to rage.

Control lines established by firefighters were breached overnight, with the fire growing “explosively” in places, according to incident commanders.

The Plumas County Sheriff’s Department continued to issue evacuation orders on Thursday, telling residents of the town of Taylorsville that they needed to flee.

By late July, the number of acres burned in California was up more than 250 percent from 2020 — itself the worst year of wildfires in the state’s modern history.

The Dixie Fire has evoked painful memories of the Paradise Fire, the deadliest blaze in California’s recent history.

Faulty power lines sparked the inferno, which swept through the northern town of Paradise in 2018, killing 86 people. Pacific Gas and Electric, California’s largest energy utility firm, was deemed responsible.

PG&E equipment is again being blamed for the Dixie Fire, after a tree fell on a power conductor the day the blaze began.

The utility announced in late July it will bury 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) of power lines in a massive bid to prevent its equipment from igniting more deadly wildfires.

Greenville itself is no stranger to fire disasters. A catastrophic blaze destroyed much of the town in 1881, and several major infernos have threatened residents in the intervening 140 years.  

“It’s a very sad moment,” said a villager in Evia who had to evacuate as a violent fire ravages the Greek island, one of dozens of blazes that have torn through the country this week in the worst heatwave in over three decades.

“Luckily everyone is ok,” Konstantinos Konstantinidise told AFP.

“We’re going to bounce back, hopefully with state help, and we hope to be able to enjoy the summer in our village like we always did,” the 79-year-old said.

In Kourkouloi, his village, thick yellow smoke covers the top of the mountain as water-bombing planes and helicopters fly up ahead over and over again in a relentless struggle against the flames.

Firefighters were battling a series of raging blazes in sweltering heat on Thursday in western and eastern Greece, and on the outskirts of Athens where a fire that had been coming under control regained strength.

“We will be fighting on all fronts throughout the day. The conditions are tough, very unusual,” civil protection minister Michalis Chrisochoidis told ERT television.

Six out of thirteen regions, including Attica where Athens is located, have been placed on high alert for Friday, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced on Thursday evening.

“Our country is facing an extremely critical situation,” he said, as the country experiences the worst heatwave in more than 30 years that has seen temperatures rise to 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) in some places.

“Unfortunately, the difficulties are still ahead of us and the night ahead is worrying.”

– ‘We need help’ –

According to Giannis Tsapourniotis, the mayor of Mantoudi in Evia, the island blaze is spreading on four fronts, including one that is advancing out of control near a monastery that was forcefully evacuated on Wednesday.

The 12 monks at Saint David Monastery agreed to leave after several hours of negotiations with security forces.

In Kourkoloi, local resident Ioannis Aslanis says he saved what he could.

“It’s a disaster, everything burnt in the village.”

On the island, the second biggest in Greece after Crete, some 500 soldiers assisted by around 40 planes and helicopters were due to arrive on Thursday as back-up, said Konstantinos Floros, head of the armed forces.

France despatched 40 rescue workers to Evia on Thursday.

Hundreds of houses have already burnt down on the island, as have swathes of pine forests.

– 92 wildfires in 24 hours –

Firefighters said Thursday morning they had had to tackle 92 blazes within 24 hours.

North of Athens, a blaze that firefighters had hoped to control regained strength on Thursday evening, after having destroyed large areas of pine forests.

Caused by sudden gusts of wind, the resurgence forced the evacuation of several villages as the flames came dangerously near people’s homes, ERT reported.

Asylum seekers in a nearby camp were also due to be transferred to other facilities, according to the migrations ministry.

Acrid smoke from the fire poured over Athens, where the air quality has deteriorated fast.

Squirrels’ acrobatic leaps across treetops depend on complex split-second calculations and inventive “parkour” maneuvers to stick tricky landings, a new study in the journal Science said Thursday.

Scientists at UC Berkeley designed obstacle courses to better understand how the bushy-tailed rodents gauge and adjust their movements on the fly, as they dart away from predators and avoid potentially fatal falls.

The hope is that the research could one day help to build more agile robots with better decision-making skills.

“Squirrels have a combination of traits that make them very interesting: one being their acrobatic nature, their biomechanics and their powerful muscles that they can use to leap many times their body length,” lead author Nathan Hunt told AFP.

“The other is their cognitive capabilities, they have great memories, they’re highly creative animals, and they’re really good at problem solving.”

The team used peanuts to lure wild fox squirrels on the edge of campus to their experiments.

Perches were set up to simulate tree branches, forcing the squirrels to jump gaps of varying distances in order to receive their treats. 

The scientists were keen to learn how the animals would negotiate a critical trade-off: Moving towards the end of a perch reduced leaping distance, but compromised stability and jumping force as the launch platform became more wobbly.

It turned out the squirrels preferred to launch from the base of the perch, particularly when the branches were bendier. In fact, the bendiness of the branch was six times more critical than the gap distance in their decision making.

Throughout the experiments, none of the squirrels ever fell, because they used a variety of strategies — and their sharp claws — to recover from imperfect landings.

If they jumped too far, they would swing over the target perch and perform a roll around it to stick the landing.

If they jumped short, they swung underneath the perch before pulling themselves up.

But the most surprising innovation came when the squirrels didn’t aim for the target branch directly at all, instead bouncing off an adjacent wall to make the most challenging leaps, akin to parkour.

When squirrels are chased by hawks, their escapes come down to a matter of centimeters (inches), which is probably why they evolved to become so nimble, said Hunt.

While the research might one day further the field of robotics, it’s also something people can appreciate when they see squirrels in parks or in their gardens, said Hunt.

“It’s a fun thing to communicate this research because people watch squirrels in their backyard all the time. Actually, as I just sit in my backyard and watch them, I come up with other ideas for experiments that I’d like to do.”

Turkish coastguards evacuated hundreds of villagers away from a smouldering power plant Thursday and Greek firefighters battled a major blaze near an ancient Olympic site as a historic heatwave wreaked havoc across Europe’s southeast.

The two regional rivals have been united this week in their fight against disasters that top officials and experts link to increasingly frequent and intense weather events caused by climate change.

Eight people have died and dozens have been hospitalised across the southern coasts of Turkey since the wildfires erupted last week.

The blazes in Greece this week briefly cut off the main road leading to Athens and saw worrying fires break out in Olympia — the birthplace of the Olympic Games that is usually crowded with tourists — and on the eastern island of Evia.

“If some people still doubt if climate change is real, let them come and see the intensity of phenomena here,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said while inspecting the ruins where the first Olympic Games where held in ancient times.

The blazes forced also the government of North Macedonia to declare a 30-day state of emergency and the defence ministry in its Balkan neighbour Albania to declare the situation “critical” because of the threat to village homes.

The fires killed one person in Albania this week.

But perhaps the biggest shock came when winds whipped up a flash fire that subsumed the grounds of an Aegean coast power plant in Turkey storing thousands of tonnes of coal.

– ‘Where could we go?’ –

An AFP team saw fleeing villagers — some clutching pets they managed to grab from their homes — piling onto coastguard speedboats at the nearby port as roaring flames lapped the 35-year-old plant in the dark of night.

But a few older locals refused to leave the disaster-hit region even while thousands of others were shuttled out by car or boats racing along the Aegean Sea.

“Where do you want us to go at our age?” asked 79-year-old Hulusi Kinic.

“We live here. This is our home. Our last solution was to throw ourselves in the sea (if there was an explosion), but thank God that did not happen.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office said an initial inspection conducted after the flames had been doused by the morning showed “no serious damage to the main units in the plant”.

An AFP team saw yellow smoke smoulder over parts of the plant on Thursday morning.

– ‘Asking for reinforcements’ –

More than 110 wildfires have been raging in Greece since Wednesday and nearly 190 have lit up Turkey since July 28 — more than a dozen of them still active on Thursday night.

The unfolding disasters have seen the leaders of both countries come under pressure from local officials for what they felt was an insufficiently resolute response.

The Turkish mayor of the Aegean town where the power plant caught fire had been waging a tireless social media campaign warning of an imminent disaster.

“We are asking the authorities to reinforce the air and land forces so as not to risk human lives,” the mayor of the Evia town of Limni, Giorgos Tsapourniotis, told Greece’s ANA news agency.

A top Greek official this week also lamented a lack of sufficient environmental controls.

“We are in a phase of complete climate deregulation,” said Greek Deputy Civil Protection Minister Nikos Hardalias.

– Erdogan on the defensive –

Erdogan has come under especially withering criticism for being slow or unwilling to accept some offers of foreign assistance after revealing that Turkey had no functioning firefighting planes.

The crisis has posed an unexpected challenge to the powerful Turkish leader two years before he faces an election that could extend his rule into a third decade.

Erdogan tried to mount a political counterattack in a television interview Wednesday that began just as news broke that the fire had reached the Aegean power plant.

“When fires break out in America or Russia, (the opposition) stands by the government. We don’t have this,” Erdogan said.

The prosecutors’ office also launched an investigation into social media posts about the fire that were “trying to create anxiety, fear and panic in the public, and to humiliate the Turkish government”.

The largest wildfire in California has razed a small town in the state’s parched northeast, warping street lights and destroying historic buildings hours after residents were ordered to flee. 

Greenville, an Indian Valley settlement of a few hundred people dating back to the mid-1800s Gold Rush, was engulfed by flames as winds whipped the inferno towards the community, turning the sky orange.

“I’d say the majority of downtown Greenville is completely destroyed,” tweeted wildfire photographer Stuart Palley, sharing images of the devastation. 

“My heart is broken for this beautiful little town.”

The Dixie Fire has been raging in the forests of northern California since mid-July, part of a climate crisis that has brought sweltering heat and an alarming drought.

Authorities had earlier issued evacuation alerts to residents, as high winds fanned the fire which, at 500 square miles (1,300 sq km), has grown to more than seven times the size of the US capital, Washington.

The blaze is so big that it has been generating its own weather system.

“We did everything we could,” California Fire spokesman Mitch Matlow told reporters. “Sometimes it’s just not enough.”

Images taken by an AFP photographer showed the fire’s heat had bent street lights to the ground, with only a few structures still standing.

A gas station, a hotel and a bar were destroyed, as well as many buildings that were more than a century old.

The fire entered the town at roughly 4:00 pm Wednesday (2300 GMT) according to Jake Cagle, incident management team operations section chief.

He said firefighters were struggling with those not obeying evacuation orders, leading to them having to divert time and resources to rescue people in the path of the flames. 

“It’s just intense fire behavior, and it’s not what we’re used to,” he said.

“Firefighters are fighting for the town of Greenville,” US Forest Service spokeswoman Pandora Valle told the San Francisco Chronicle late Wednesday, but was unable to give further details.

– ‘Imminent danger’ –

The Plumas County Sheriff’s Department issued an evacuation order late Tuesday for the 2,000 or so residents of Chester to flee the area.

“If you remained you should evacuate to the EAST, IMMEDIATELY!” the sheriff’s department posted on their official Facebook page Wednesday.

“If you cannot evacuate and you are threatened by fire and can safely get there, take refuge at the Chester High School baseball field!”

In a second warning on social media, the department added: “If you are still in the Greenville area, you are in imminent danger and you MUST leave now!!” 

“If you remain, emergency responders may not be able to assist you.”

By late July, the number of acres burned in California was up more than 250 percent from 2020 — itself the worst year of wildfires in the state’s modern history.

The Dixie Fire has evoked painful memories of the Paradise Fire, the deadliest blaze in California’s recent history.

Faulty power lines sparked the inferno, which swept through the northern town of Paradise in 2018, killing 86 people. Pacific Gas and Electric, California’s largest energy utility firm, was deemed responsible.

PG&E equipment is again being blamed for the Dixie Fire, after a tree fell on a power conductor the day the blaze began.

The utility announced in late July it will bury 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) of power lines in a massive bid to prevent its equipment from igniting more deadly wildfires.

Greenville itself is no stranger to fire disasters. A catastrophic blaze destroyed much of the town in 1881 and several major infernos have threatened residents in the intervening 140 years.