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ByScottSmith TheAssociatedPress FRESNO More than 200 people were ordered from their homes Tuesday when a wildfire jumped a con- tainment line east of Cal- ifornia's Napa Valley wine country in one of several blazes burning across the state. The week-old fire was given a burst of energy by rising temperatures, wind gusts and low humid- ity, said Daniel Berlant, a spokesman for the Cali- fornia Department of For- estry and Fire Protection. A smoke plume was vis- ible for miles. The flare-up in the rug- ged, steep terrain of So- lano County quickly con- sumed 150 acres. The fire has charred more than 10 square miles and fire- fighters had it mostly con- tained, despite the addi- tional area that burned. "With the winds picking up, they're challenging us," Berlant said, adding that firefighters have dug a sec- ondary containment line. "We're hoping those lines will hold it where it's at." Residents of 136 homes were ordered to leave, said Christine Castillo of the Solano County Sheriff's Office. In the Central Califor- nia foothills, helicopters and air tankers were at- tacking another fire burn- ing near the tiny wooded communities of Bass Lake and Cascadel Woods north of Fresno. Residents remained un- der orders to be prepared to evacuate because of the fire, which has charred nearly 3 square miles. A boy acknowledged starting the fire by playing with a lighter to burn pine needles, Madera County District Attorney David Linn said, noting the boy tried to smother the fire with his clothes and his family fought it with water. "As dry as the condi- tions are in the Sierra now ... they couldn't stop it," said Linn, declining to identify the boy, who re- mains at home because of his cooperation and could be charged next week. In the Sierra Nevada foothills northeast of Sac- ramento, 50 homes re- mained evacuated be- cause of a wildfire that ig- nited Saturday. As many as 1,800 homes were threat- ened by shifting winds, Berlant said. Four firefighters were hurt Sunday while battling the wildfire. One had seri- ous, non-life threatening injuries and remains hos- pitalized. The firefighter was iden- tified as Matt Aoki, a cap- tain of the Los Padres Hot- shots from Los Padres Na- tional Forest. Aoki has severe burns on his hands and face. He remained hos- pitalized at UC Davis Med- ical Center in Sacramento. The fire grew overnight to more than 3 square miles. Temperatures through- out Northern California could hit 108 Wednesday. California has seen more wildfires this year, but less acreage has been burned thanks to favorable weather and more fire- fighters who can quickly be dispatched to corral flames, fire officials say. Since Jan. 1, about 5,200 fires have burned on state and federal lands, accord- ing to the U.S. Forest Ser- vice. That's 10 percent more than last year, but the 74,000 acres burned is 6 percent less. Spurts of unseason- ably rainy weather com- bined with the availability of hundreds of additional firefighters paid for with emergency drought fund- ing have made a big differ- ence, Berlant said. So far this year, state firefighters have re- sponded to nearly 3,900 blazes — a 41 percent in- crease from the same pe- riod last year, according to Cal Fire. INVESTIGATION ERICPAULZAMORA—THEFRESNOBEE A helicopter flies over Willow Creek Canyon. More wildfires have torn across California so far this year compared with the same period of 2014. NorthernCalifornia wildfire jumps line, forces evacuations The Associated Press WASHINGTON Free-fall- ing miles above the desert, his test spaceship ripped to pieces and the frigid air hard to breathe, pilot Peter Siebold struggled through crippling injuries to turn on his oxygen and just to stay conscious. Siebold was aware that Virgin Galactic's Space- ShipTwo had violently dis- integrated but then blacked out. When he awoke, still far above the California des- ert, he repeatedly tried in vain to activate his backup oxygen. He next remembered the jolt of his parachute auto- matically opening and the sensation of just having wo- ken up. The National Transpor- tation Safety Board released Siebold's description of his harrowing plunge last Oc- tober during a Tuesday hearing. Siebold did not tes- tify; his account came from a written summary of a Jan- uary interview done by ac- cident investigators as part of their inquiry. Virgin Galactic chief ex- ecutive George Whitesides described Siebold's sur- vival at the time as mirac- ulous. Though bad, his inju- ries were not life-threaten- ing — his right leg broke in four places, as did his col- larbone. He was cut up, ex- tensively bruised and had trouble seeing. Siebold didn't realize the extent of his injuries until he landed, falling forward into a creosote bush. The pilot told investiga- tors that he considered the test flight high risk because SpaceShipTwo was "flying an unproven rocket motor" on an ambitious flight plan. The motor was not a fac- tor in the accident. The safety board concluded the breakup was triggered when co-pilot Michael Als- bury prematurely unlocked a braking system as the craft hurtled toward space. Als- bury died in the accident. Siebold is director of flight operations for Scaled Composites, an aerospace company that has part- nered with Virgin Galactic to develop the spacecraft in Mojave, about 80 miles north of downtown Los An- geles. The safety board em- phasized that Scaled Com- posites had failed to put in place ways that would have prevented the braking sys- tem's early initiation. Virgin Galactic has said it hopes to resume test flights later this year with a new craft. The company's goal is to fly six passengers more than 62 miles above Earth. ACCIDENT RINGO H.W. CHIU — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE Law enforcement officials take a closer look at the wreckage near the site where a Virgin Galactic space tourism rocket, SpaceShipTwo, exploded and crashed in Mojave. The explosion killed a pilot aboard and seriously injured another while scattering wreckage in Southern California's Mojave Desert, witnesses and officials said. Spaceship pilot describes the harrowing free fall a er breakup By Ellen Knickmeyer The Associated Press SANFRANCISCO Ivory deal- ers in San Francisco's Chi- natown stood in their shop doors next to windows full of carved ivory tusks and trinkets, unfazed by pro- posed federal rules that the White House says go as far as possible to ban the U.S. trade of ivory from the world's endangered el- ephants. "Wooly mammoth ivory," not elephant ivory, Michael Rasoyli said this week of the carved tusks for sale in the store he manages. "Cow bone," Virginia Lo, manager of a Chinatown shop next door, said of the half-dozen curved tusks up to 4 ½ feet long that she was selling. Those claims are a ruse, according to opponents of the global trade in elephant ivory. San Francisco and Los Angeles make up two of the country's top three hubs for ivory sales, and most deal- ers in the state rely on inten- tional mislabeling to cover up the illegal sale of recently poached African elephants, wildlife groups and some ivory experts say. The proposed federal rules would not close the mislabeling loopholes, ivory opponents say, but a bill be- fore state lawmakers would narrow them in California by banning ivory-like mate- rial from many animals, ad- vocates say. The regulations, an- nounced by Obama on Sat- urday during his state visit to Kenya, would limit most interstate trade in elephant ivory to antiques that the seller can prove are at least a century old, and to items, such as gunstocks with ivory inlay, that include only a small percentage of ivory overall. In Chinatown, German tourist Heike Dietrich stopped cold at the sight of the tusks — carved into re- liefs of elephants and other African wildlife — on dis- play Monday at Rasoyli's store. "I can't believe it," Di- etrich said, leaning in for a closer look. "It's forbid- den. Everybody knows the elephants are endangered. They massacre them to get these?" Surging demand for ivory among China's growing middle class has spurred poaching that is destroy- ing elephant herds in Af- rica. The philosophy of feng shui says owning ivory will bring good luck. And giving it as gifts can be a sign of prosperity in China. In Chinatown, dealers give prices ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 for what they say are wooly mammoth tusks. Tanzania said last month that ivory hunters had killed 60 percent of the country's elephants in just five years. Mozambique re- ported a 48 percent decline in elephants in the same pe- riod. After China, the United States is the world's largest consumer of ivory, as well as a key conduit for ivory sales internationally, ac- cording to wildlife groups. Typically, poached ele- phant ivory coming into the U.S. is mixed with legal loo- kalikes — hippo, mammoth, or plastic ivory facsimi- les — and labeled as mam- moth, Kenya-based ivory re- searcher Daniel Stiles wrote last year for the Natural Re- sources Defense Council en- vironmental group. Thawing of Arctic per- mafrost is bringing an in- creasing number of tusks of long-dead wooly mam- moth to global markets, but Stiles estimated that up to 90 percent of ivory on sale last year in Los Angeles and 80 percent on sale then in San Francisco was illegal el- ephant ivory. The U.S. Fish and Wild- life Service, asked about the difficulty of discerning ivory of the extinct wooly mammoth from that of il- legally killed African ele- phants, said the agency re- quires a trained scientist to positively identify the spe- cies from which any carved ivory object originated. Elly Pepper, an ivory ex- pert with the Natural Re- sources Defense Council, said she knew of no federal legislation restricting trade in wooly mammoth tusks. ENDANGERED ELEPHANTS US iv or y ru le s no t fa zi ng C hi na to wn s ho ps ERIC RISBERG — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Carvings of elephants and other animals are shown inside a mammoth ivory tusk for sale in the window of a Chinatown shop in San Francisco. 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