Hundreds of strike units with fire engines and 4,300 firefighters from local departments have been posted across northern and central California to annihilate more than 800 wildfires, ranging from Monterey County to the Oregon border. Conditions of summer rain, wind and lightning along mountains and deserts over the last few days have generated hundreds of small fires and several larger ones. This led to the appearance of a blanket of smoke over the region.

“In some parts of the state, the quantity of particulate matter in the air is five times higher than it was last week”, said Dimitri Stanich, a spokesman for the California Air Resources Board. “Air quality is particularly unhealthy near the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where many fires are blazing and where winds are collecting the smoke from other fires,” Stanich said.

At least 57,940 acres have burned because of the Indians Fire in the Ventana Wilderness area of Los Padres National Forest in Monterey County. It is considered to be contained in a 66 percentage. Two homes and 13 outbuildings have been ruined, while 1,063 residences, 265 outbuildings and five commercial properties are still at risk. Nine firefighters have been injured because of this fire.

On Friday, lightning strikes started a series of wildfires, known as the Lime Complex Fire, in Trinity County. This complex fire in Shasta-Trinity National Forest, five miles south of Hyampom, comprises more than 70 separate wildfires, differing in size from one to 400 acres, and is driven by persistent dry conditions and wind.

In a day’s worth, an electrical storm unleashed around 8,000 lightning strikes that determined more than 800 wildfires to arise across Northern California — a scarce example of "dry lightning" that brought little or no rain but an abundance of sparks to the state's dehydrated forests, prairies and meadows.

The weekend storm was atypical not only because it produced so many lightning strikes over a vast geographical area, but also because it struck so early in the season and moved in from the Pacific Ocean. Such storms normally don't occur until the end of July or August and typically form southeast of California.