Video of a “fire tornado” follows. My friend Kris Kuyper writes on Facebook:

BIG Pyrocumulus clouds now forming above the smoke plume of the #CarrFire!

The dirty part on the bottom is the smoke plume rising from the fire. The intense heating from this rising plume eventually reaches a level in the atmosphere where it can form a cumulus cloud, that’s the white part on top. It’s called a Pyrocumulus Cloud.

Using Doppler radar, he notes; Tops of the Pyrocumulus cloud over the #CarrFire are now up to 32,000’!

Here is a video of a heat vortex from the Carr Fire. It looks like a tornado, but isn’t. It’s the same mechanism as dust devils and fire whirls that creates this rotating inferno.

Skip Murphy of Redding took this video and writes on Facebook:

In case you were wondering what a fire tornado looks like, this is from Rocky Point School off Lake Blvd. yesterday. No audio, but it sounds like a freight train, punctuated with explosions. Never seen anything like it. At the end of this was when I suddenly realized “Run, fool!” We are fine with friends in Cottonwood (Thanks Craig and Colleen!). Not sure about the house. Prayers upon prayers for our community, and our very brave first responders and firefighters.

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