Wildfires ravage historic California Gold Rush town

Wildfires sparked by lightning tore through two Northern California counties this week, triggering widespread evacuations and damaging a historic Gold Rush mining town with deep Chinese immigrant roots.
The remote village of Chinese Camp, a town of fewer than 100 residents on the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada in California's Gold Country region, was particularly hard hit by one of the fires.
According to a Reuters journalist on the scene, the blaze destroyed dozens of homes in and around Chinese Camp, a remnant of the Gold Rush-era mining community first settled by thousands of Chinese laborers in the mid-19th century.
Flames also gutted two historic buildings, including an old stagecoach stop, and scorched a hilltop cemetery, but left the adjacent church established in 1854 unscathed, Cal Fire spokesperson Jaime Williams said.
The entire town and several other communities in Tuolumne County and neighboring Calaveras County remained under evacuation orders as a firefighting force of more than 600 personnel battled to contain the blazes, Cal Fire said.
The full extent of property losses and evacuations had yet to be determined, but there were no immediate reports of casualties.
Sticking with the topic of wildfires, the U.S. government sued Southern California Edison this week, seeking damages for a 2022 blaze it blamed on a sagging power line operated by the utility.
The filing noted that the company should pay for suppression costs and rehabilitation of lands within the San Bernardino National Forest in Riverside County, California.
The latest California blazes come as a report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said that wildfires – likely to have been made more frequent by climate change – made significant contributions to air pollution last year.
The World Health Organization says ambient air pollution causes 4.5 million premature deaths a year, and the WMO report for 2024 pointed to pollution hotspots in places that experienced intense fires such as the Amazon Basin, Canada, Siberia and central Africa.