As the Rim Fire continues to burn through a New York City-sized area of forest, fire crews Saturday enter their second week of battling the blaze as officials investigate the cause of one of the largest fires in California history, which may have been started by marijuana growers.
The San Jose Mercury News reported that a Tuolumne County fire official told a community meeting that the fire was not caused by lighting and was definitely man-made, suggesting it was kindled by an illicit marijuana growing operation.
"We know it was human caused, there was no lightning in the area," Twain Harte Fire Chief Todd McNeil said to a community meeting in a video posted to YouTube on Aug. 23. "But we don't know the exact cause of what it was."
(In the video below fast forward to the six-minute mark to hear McNeil say this.)
"We highly suspect there might have been some sort of illicit grove, you know, a marijuana-grow type thing, but it doesn't really matter at this point."
As of Saturday morning, the most updated information from Inciweb, the online wildfire information system used by states in the West, indicated the Rim fire stood at 213,414 acres (333 square miles), an area larger than New York City, Chicago or Kansas City, Mo. The wildfire is 35 percent contained and crews expect to have the blaze fully contained by Friday, Sept. 20.
Marijuana-growing operations are common in the Sierra Nevada forests; drug cartels find it easier to grow the bulky plant locally rather than try to smuggle it across borders.
Randy Hanvelt, chairman of the Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors, told the Mercury News that he suspects the Rim Fire may have burned the crops of many of the forests' marijuana growers.
"We know that these illegal pot growers are out in our forests, and I think this fire just wiped out a whole bunch of them," Hanvelt said.
"It's a problem in all the Sierra forests," Hanvelt added. "When we find them, we pull out like 20,000 plants at a time."
The Rim Fire has burned more than just pot farms. According to Cal Fire it has destroyed 111 structures (11 residences, 97 outbuildings, three commercial buildings) and continues to threaten another 5,500 structures.
On Friday night the Mariposa County Sheriff's Office issued a mandatory evacuation for the areas north and south of Bull Creek Road to Little Grizzly Mountain.
The Rim Fire is also threatening to send years of research at the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest up in smoke, according to AccuWeather.com. The experimental forest has been used since the 1920s as a home-base for forest fire research.