Hundreds of fires sparked by rare lightning storm

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The rare storm brought plenty of sparks to the state's parched forests and grasslands.

The storm was rare because it struck so early in the season and because it generated so many lightning strikes over a very large geographical area. The storm also moved in from the pacific ocean and storms like this usually don't arrive until late August or July.

John Juskie is a science officer with the National Weather Service in Sacramento and he says that the pattern of the storm is climatologically rare and he also says that the Northern part of the state usually sees weather like this later on in the season and not in June.

On Tuesday a few thousand firefighters were busy battling blazes from the ground and air and surprisingly there were no homes destroyed but voluntary evacuations were in place for residents of at least 25 homes.

Juskie also said that the storm brought little precipitation because the rain evaporated in hot, dry layers of the atmosphere before it hit the ground.

The storm hit California when the state was experiencing one of its driest years on record. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a statewide drought earlier this month and directed agencies to speed up water deliveries to drought-stricken areas.

Cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles have only seen a tiny fraction of the rainfall they normally receive in a typical year. Sacramento, Modesto, Stockton and Red Bluff have recorded their driest March-to-May periods since at least the 19th century.

The fire season usually starts in July and does not peak until late summer or early fall but California is already seeing an unusually large number of wildfires and that is before the lightning storm hit.

ken Clark is a meteorologist in Southern California with AccuWeather.com and he says that the situation is only going to get worse because it is not fire season yet and the brush is extremely dry.

The conditions combined with the weekend's storm sparked about 840 separate blazes from the Big Sur area of Monterey County to Del Norte County on the Oregon border. Mendocino County was one of the hardest hit areas, where 131 fires have burned more than 13,000 acres. Lake County was also hit very hard where six fires scorched more than 12,000 acres and the Shasta-Trinity Forest where more than 150 fires have burned about 8,000 acres.

Northern California could be struck by more dry thunderstorms later this week, according to the weather service.

That is a lot of land that is being burned up but the good news is that so far no homes were damaged and so far no people were hurt. Hopefully this situation will be taken care of or get better soon.