California’s wildfire crisis escalated on Tuesday as resurgent strong winds fanned the state’s biggest conflagration, drove flames from a separate, smaller blaze into a rural mountain community and prompted widespread precautionary power shutoffs. Already the second-largest California wildfire on record, the Dixie fire raging since mid-July in the rugged Sierra Nevada range northeast of San Francisco had charred 604,000 acres of drought-parched timber and brush as of Tuesday morning, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). That tally was up 34,000 acres from the day before, marking one of the fire’s biggest 24-hour growth spurts since its earliest days last month. Doug Ulibarri, a spokesman for the Dixie incident command, attributed the surge to extreme winds that blew up across much of northern California Monday night. But he said containment lines carved by strike teams around nearly […]