As of Friday evening, the Creek Fire reached 284 square miles.
It's still 6% contained, the same as the day before.
CAL Fire explained, although the containment number stayed the same, that’s actually good news.
It means it was able to maintain that number throughout the day, and it was able to keep fire growth way down.
The first few days, they were focused on getting people evacuated, and keeping as many communities as possible from looking like this.
Now, they’re finally able to work on stopping the fire.
Representative Jim Costa and State Senator Andreas Borgeas spent the day talking with firefighters and looking over the damage from the Creek Fire.
“This our backyard. There is no reason why the policies and the regulations and the administrative instruments of the state cannot be helpful. And clearly, what we’ve done in the past is not working. We need significant changes and forest management needs to be at the top of our list," said State Senator Borgeas.
Representative Costa expressed his gratitude for the firefighters working on the Creek Fire.
”You can’t understand how hard they work and how courageous they are until you see it."
Both of those lawmakers are now saying what we are doing in California clearly isn’t working.
They’re mainly focused on resources and staffing, which they feel could have made a difference here.
CAL Fire Public Information Officer Eric Vestal says the first few days, there were only 900 firefighters working on the Creek Fire. That number has since doubled.
“We’re finally getting the resources we need to actually start to contain this incident... even though the number percentage of containment didn’t go up, we are working to get the fuel breaks wider so that we “
Representative Costa says he’s been trying to get more resources for forest management for years.
”We allocate a certain amount of money to put out fires, and a certain amount of money to manage the forest. The intensity of the forest fires has been such that we spend all the money to put out forest fires, and then we take some of the money from forest management. So we really need to take a different change of focus with climate change, with more people living in areas they didn’t live 10 or 20 years ago - managing and trying to get a good balance has been a challenge.”
Right now, for this fire, CAL Fire is taking a tone of very cautious optimism.
“We need to remember that just because we don’t see the big plume or smoke.. any change in the weather... could lead to more active fire situations," said Vestal.
Cal Fire is still focusing its containment efforts mostly on the southern side of the fire, and trying to push the fire into natural barriers like the San Joaquin River.