California national park wraps ancient trees in foil as raging wildfire tears through forests

Fire crews in California have wrapped the base of the world’s largest tree in a thick blanket of aluminium foil in the hopes of saving it from a raging wildfire.

The massive KNP Complex fire is tearing through Sequoia National Park threatening its forest of ancient sequoias including the 275-ft General Sherman.

Fire service officials have also wrapped the Giant Forest Museum and other buildings in the park in foil to protect them from the flames, National Park Service spokeswoman, Rebecca Paterson, said.

The heat-resistant metal sheets helps trees and structures to withstand intense heat for short periods and has been deployed for several years by US officials.

Pictures, shared by local businesses in the area, showed fire crews wrapping wooden signs and trees in the national park. Sequoia National Park was closed to visitors earlier this week as the fire continued to encroach.

Nearly 500 personnel have been deployed to tackle the blaze, according to government data.

“Fires are burning in both Sequoia National Park and Sequoia National Forest putting the areas off-limits to visitors for now. These are rapidly evolving situations with crews working hard to reduce the fires’ impacts on our beautiful giant sequoias,” tweeted Visit Visalia, a tourism platform in the region.

Two separate fires are currently burning in Sequoia National Park - the Colony and Paradise fires. The Colony Fire is likely to reach a giant forest of 2,000 sequoia trees within days, fire officials said.

It has been a long summer of overlapping wildfires in California and other western states. Some 77 large fires are burning across the US, destroying nearly 3.2 million acres.

Active fire behavior has been reported on large fires in California, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Oklahoma, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

The Paradise fire is burning in an area of steep inclines meaning that fire crews only have limited access on the ground to douse the flames. They have resorted to extensive aerial water and flame-retardant drops on both fires.

However there has been some respite for firefighters as the Complex has not grown significantly in the last 24 hours, fire spokeswoman Katy Hooper said.

Last year, thousands of sequoia trees - some as tall as high-rises and dating back to thousands of years - were reduced to ashes in a wildfire.

Known to be the largest in the world by volume, the grand General Sherman Tree at 52,508 cubic feet (1,487 cubic meters) has a circumference of 103 feet at the ground level.

Adapted to smaller fires, the giant sequoias thrive in such conditions as it helps them release seeds from their cones and create clearings that allow the younger sequoias to grow.

However, fires triggered by climate crisis can overwhelm the forest vegetation with overbearing intensity of flames witnessed at Castle Fire last year which killed at least 7,500 to 10,600 large sequoias, the National Park Service said.