Preston Brown knows the risk of wildfire that comes with living in the rural, chaparral-lined hills of San Diego County. He’s lived there for 21 years and evacuated twice.

That’s why he fiercely opposed a plan to build more than 1,100 homes in a fire-prone area he said would be difficult to evacuate safely. Brown sits on the local planning commission, and he said the additional people would clog the road out.

“It’s a very rough area,” Brown said. “We have fires all the time now.”

A wildfire threatening the largest grove of giant sequoias in Yosemite National Park more than doubled in size in a day, and firefighters were working in difficult terrain Sunday to protect the iconic trees and a small mountain town as the U.S. weathers another very active year for fires.

Campers and residents near the blaze were evacuated but the rest of the sprawling park in California remained open, though heavy smoke obscured scenic vistas and created unhealthy air quality.

“Today it’s actually the smokiest that we’ve seen,” Nancy Phillipe, a Yosemite fire information spokesperson, said Sunday. “Up until this morning, the park has not been in that unhealthy category, but that is where we are now.”

A wildfire that erupted in Northern California forced evacuations as it threatened about 500 homes and other buildings, authorities said.

The Rices Fire erupted at around 2 p.m. near the Yuba River in Nevada County and had spread to more than 900 acres, according to CalFire.

The rural area is in the Sierra Nevada, northeast of Sacramento and about halfway between the state Capitol and the Nevada border.

A Southern California regional passenger rail service announced that it is testing technology that will use the West Coast’s earthquake early warning system to automatically slow or stop trains before shaking begins.

The five-county Metrolink system said the technology is an advancement of a previous version deployed in September 2021 that sends automated messages instructing train crews to slow or stop but does not have automated braking.

The combination of tropical moisture and an offshore storm will result in an uptick in thunderstorms across portions of California on Wednesday and Thursday, weather experts are warning.

With most of the storms will contain little or no rain and could lead to a surge in wildfires, AccuWeather meteorologists warn.

As Western wildfires force evacuations in Arizona and California – on the heels of an early and severe wildfire season in New Mexico – insurers are increasingly eyeing the growing risks.

“Insurers are very much concerned about the wildfire situation,” said Arindam Samanta, director of product management for Verisk Underwriting Solutions. “We are talking to dozens of insurers.”

The increased interest has led to increased sales of Verisk’s wildfire modeling and data, Samanta said.

New data shows the types of drugs used to treat injured workers in California, and the distribution of payments for those medications, has shifted over the past decade, with opioids becoming far less prevalent and anti-inflammatory drugs accounting for an increasing share of the prescriptions and the total drug spend within the workers’ comp system.

Updated figures from the California Workers’ Compensation Institute ranks the top 10 therapeutic drug categories in the state’s workers’ comp system based on the volume of prescriptions and total reimbursements.

The Cal/OSHA Process Safety Management Unit cited Valero Refinery of Benicia and three contractors a combined $1.75 million for serious safety violations following a confined space death of a 35-year-old worker who suffocated in a regenerator overflow well.

Cal/OSHA inspectors cited three of the four employers with willful and serious violations after determining that they failed to follow confined space guidelines, including the failure to determine acceptable entry conditions for the employee, which reportedly resulted in exposure to an oxygen-deficient atmosphere.

The largest wildfire in the U.S. was spreading toward mountain resort towns in northern New Mexico, prompting officials to issue another set of warnings for more people to evacuate.

Meanwhile, a wildfire that erupted Wednesday afternoon in coastal Southern California raced through coastal bluffs of multimillion-dollar mansions, burning at least 20 homes, fire officials said. The flames were fanned by gusty ocean winds but they were dying down Wednesday night. No injuries were reported but several streets were ordered evacuated.