(TNS) - Nearly three years after a swarm of Wine Country wildfires devastated California, another explosion of flames is making clear that the state’s efforts to fight the crisis may be no match for the worsening conditions fueling it.

Flames leveled entire Santa Rosa neighborhoods in 2017, then destroyed almost all of the Butte County town of Paradise 13 months later. Each of those fires set records for destruction.

In the past week, the extent and complexity of the blazes have stretched California’s firefighting resources to the limit. Over a few days, fires ignited by lightning in an intense heat wave torched an area more than twice the size of Los Angeles, forcing 119,000 people to flee in the middle of a pandemic.

(TNS) - Signs of a problem within California’s power system emerged a full day before the blackouts hit.

Trader Dov Quint sat in his basement outside Boulder, Colorado, scouring the state’s day-ahead power market for opportunities to profit from California’s heat wave. He saw something strange: Prices for electricity to be delivered the next day — the day of the blackouts — were nearing $1,000 a megawatt-hour, more than 26 times higher than last year’s average.

The last time that happened, in July 2018, the forecast for demand had been much higher. Something was amiss — were energy supplies lower than usual?

Thousands of people were under orders to evacuate in regions surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area on Aug. 19 as nearly 40 wildfires blazed across the state amid a blistering heat wave now in its second week.

Smoke blanketed the city of San Francisco.

Police and firefighters went door-to-door before dawn Wednesday in a frantic scramble to warn residents to evacuate as fire encroached on Vacaville, a city of about 100,000 that lies between San Francisco and Sacramento. Fire officials said at least 50 structures were destroyed and 50 were damaged and that four people were injured.

The number of California workers’ compensation claims for COVID-19 continues to climb, according to a new report compiled by the California Workers’ Compensation Institute.

Data from the Division of Workers’ Compensation shows that as of Aug. 10, there were 9,515 claims reported for the month of July, bringing the total for the year to 31,612 claims, or 10.2% of all California job injury claims reported for accident year 2020. Those claims include 140 death claims, up from 66 reported as of July 6.

(TNS) - Before the coronavirus pandemic, Irene Teper worked full time as a primary care doctor seeing mostly healthy patients for their routine checkups or non-emergency care. That all changed in March.

“We have been going kind of nonstop since March,” said Teper, who works at MarinHealth in Novato. “There would be weeks where we would work on weekends as well. It’s literally nonstop.”

As the pandemic worsened, Teper was tapped by MarinHealth to establish an adult care clinic where doctors would treat patients showing COVID-19 symptoms. Now Teper is assisting her colleague, internal medicine doctor Elizabeth Lowe, with the mobile testing of the county’s most vulnerable residents in nursing homes and residential care centers where cases had spread rapidly in recent months.

California firefighters battled destructive wildfires Monday as a lengthening heat wave roasted the state.

Thousands of homes were at risk and air quality deteriorated in areas affected by smoke.

The National Weather Service blanketed the state in warnings of excessive heat and high fire danger, including the threat from lightning strikes.

The current heatwave broiling Californians like no event in decades is also elevating the risk for another potential disaster in the weeks ahead: wildfires.

While heat and dry conditions have contributed to the Lake and Ranch fires burning now in Los Angeles County, fear of larger blazes looms in the weeks ahead. As a result of climate change, California sees more than twice as many fall days with “fire weather” as it did a generation ago. The current heatwave raises the odds of “wildfires later in 2020, that’s for sure,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

(TNS) - A late-summer heat wave in Southern California typically sends people fleeing to movie theaters, shopping malls and crowded beaches in search of a cool respite.

But the coronavirus pandemic has forced the closure of places where people once gathered, upending those routines.

So as temperatures soared Friday, many people instead stayed at home with their air conditioners blasting. Even though many offices and businesses were closed due to the pandemic, that intense demand — along with other factors including a dearth of power coming in from other states — was enough to create the most serious statewide energy shortage in nearly 20 years, officials said. On Saturday night, another round of temporary blackouts was ordered in parts of the state.

California’s earthquake early warnings will be a standard feature on all Android phones, bypassing the need for users to download the state’s MyShake app in order to receive alerts, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services said.

The state worked with the U.S. Geological Survey and Google, the maker of Android, to build the quake alerts into all phones that run the commonplace operating system. The deal was expected to be announced Tuesday.

The number of COVID-19 cases in California stood at 554,160 cases Sunday, according to state health department officials.

The California Department of Public Health said in a release that there have been 8,826,119 tests conducted in California, an increase of 118,592 over the prior 24-hour reporting period.

There have been 10,293 COVID-19 deaths in California since the start of the pandemic, the department reported.

Hermosa Beach officials said the city plans is using a private consulting firm to help police enforce an ordinance requiring face coverings in public areas, The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.