VIDEO: We’re now in the heart of wildfire season in Northern California. So far, 2025 has been relatively quiet. But this time five years ago, the state’s largest wildfire in modern history was just getting started. Known as the August Complex, the massive fire actually began as 38 separate lightning fires that ignited on August 17. The SCU and LNU Lightning Complex fires began that same week. A few days later, satellite images showed widespread, thick smoke across the Golden State. Air quality would stay in an unhealthy to hazardous range for weeks that summer.
By the time the August Complex fire was declared contained by Cal Fire in mid-November, it had burned 1,032,648 acres in parts of Glenn, Tehama, Mendocino, Lake, Trinity and Shasta counties. In total, 4.2 million acres burned in California during the 2020 wildfire season. Lightning is the only natural cause of wildfires, yet fires ignited by lightning can be some of the hardest for firefighters to contain. This is mostly due to the fact that lightning can strike anywhere, including areas of extreme terrain that are far from paved roads. It can take days for firefighters to spot these remote fires and getting to them can be a huge challenge. Cal Fire and other agencies have been incorporating technology to aid in the detection of lightning fires, including networks of cameras trained with artificial intelligence to spot smoke.
