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.

California’s water use jumped dramatically in March, state officials said Tuesday, as one of the driest stretches on record prompted a wave of homeowners to start watering their lawns earlier than usual in defiance of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pleas for conservation amid a severe drought.

Newsom last summer asked residents to voluntarily cut water use by 15% compared to 2020 as climate change intensified a drought that threatened to drain the state’s reservoirs to dangerously low levels. Water conservation increased gradually through December, aided by some intense fall and early winter storms that reduced water demand.

Between vast almond orchards and dairy pastures in the heart of California’s farm country sits a property being redesigned to look like it did 150 years ago, before levees restricted the flow of rivers that weave across the landscape.

The 2,100 acres at the confluence of the Tuolumne and San Joaquin rivers in the state’s Central Valley are being reverted to a floodplain. That means when heavy rains cause the rivers to go over their banks, water will run onto the land, allowing traditional ecosystems to flourish and lowering flood risk downstream.