The fire season continues to expand in California. A few years ago, it was in the fall that the fires were the most worrying. Now earlier, they are also more frequent, more spectacular and longer, such as the Dixie Fire, a megafire which swept away, from mid-July to the end of October 2021, nearly 390,000 hectares – fires in Gironde, month of July, affected nearly 21,000 hectares.
In this month of September 2022, California is ablaze in the north as in the south. While two people died in a fire in Hemet, southeast of Los Angeles, another fire worries authorities every day more in the Sacramento area, the state capital. By September 15, the Mosquito Fire had already devoured more than 25,000 acres, making it the largest this year in California. The fire started at the end of the long weekend of Labor Day (the Labor Day, September 5 this year), during which the mercury exceeded 40 ° C in a large part of the State, hit by a heat dome.
13,696 houses destroyed
This meteorological phenomenon, made more frequent by global warming, causes the stagnation of warm air masses and increases the risk of fire in a region that suffers from chronic drought. Earlier in the summer, still in California, the whole United States trembled for the giant sequoias of Yosemite National Park, threatened for several days by the flames – they were finally spared.
The phenomenon has become so common that each new conflagration seems to erase the memories of the previous one. Paradise is probably an exception. Balance sheet question – 89 dead. Name issue, too. “Hell in Heaven”: the oxymoron has been used extensively to describe the horror that this small northern California town went through in 2018. In four hours on November 8, the Camp Fire swept away Paradise. Among the 89 killed, most were elderly people who had no time to leave their homes. The fire will not be fully extinguished until November 25, leaving behind 61,900 devastated hectares, 13,696 houses destroyed and thousands displaced. An indelible fire.
Photographer Maxime Riché visited Paradise for the first time in 2020. “I saw the parable that could be drawn from a catastrophe bearing such a name”, he remembers. An engineer by training, he specialized in biology and health when the Copenhagen Climate Conference was held in 2009. He then turns to photography to tell the relationship between man and the living. This is the heart of his work on Paradise. “I didn’t just want to do a subject on the environment, what interested me was to talk about us: what do we do after that? Do we change or do we start the same again? »
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