Sewn by hand, hundreds of quilts are being sent to one Placerville, California, quilt shop and then being gifted to each Caldor Fire survivor."Our first giveaway, we had people walking in just in shock. They didn't know what to expect, it was hard for them to even walk through the door. But by the time they left, they were cuddled up in their quilts and smiling and hugging us," said Janet Barnard, the organizer of Caldor Quilts.Barnard helped organize a group called Caldor Quilts, which provide free quilts to the thousands of people who lost everything."Everyone heard about the terrible fires, and quilters love to help," Barnard said.Organizers say quilts have been made both locally and across the United States, and have been arriving in literal truckloads."We had a few quilts from great grandparents, and grandmas, and they all got lost in the fire," said Kelly Disalvi, as she and her son picked out quilts of their own. Their family lived in Grizzly Flats, and she said they had moments to evacuate before the fire overtook their mountain.Disalvi's teenage son, Calvin while picking out a quilt, explained he hopes to keep his new quilt and pass it along to his own kids one day.Caldor Quilts has gifted over 200 quilts to survivors."I am really, really overtaken by these women and just the community, the support," said another survivor, Debi Goedeck, while selecting her new quilt.Challenges facing the many Caldor survivors are many, including the sacristy of rental homes in their area. Caldor Quilts said it's important they provide options to the survivors to give them the power of choice in selecting something for themselves.If you would like to make and gift a quilt to a Caldor survivor, email caldorquilts@gmail.com.

Related video above: President Biden talks about fires and climate change after surveying Caldor Fire damage

The two biggest economies and largest carbon polluters in the world announced separate financial attacks on climate change Tuesday.

Chinese President Xi Jinping said his country will no longer fund coal-fired power plants abroad, surprising the world on climate for the second straight year at the U.N. General Assembly. That came hours after U.S. President Joe Biden announced a plan to double financial aid to poorer nations to $11.4 billion by 2024 so those countries could switch to cleaner energy and cope with global warming's worsening impacts. That puts rich nations close to within reach of its long-promised but not realized goal of $100 billion a year in climate help for developing nations.

"This is an absolutely seminal moment," said Xinyue Ma, an expert on energy development finance at Boston University's Global Development Policy Center.

This could provide some momentum going into major climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, in less than six weeks, experts said. Running up to the historic 2015 Paris climate deal, a joint U.S.-China agreement kickstarted successful negotiations. This time, with China-U.S. relations dicey, the two nations made their announcements separately, hours and thousands of miles apart.

"Today was a really good day for the world," United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is hosting the upcoming climate negotiations, told Vice President Kamala Harris.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who has made a frenetic push this week for bigger efforts to curb climate change called the two announcements welcome news, but said "we still have a long way to go" to make the Glasgow meeting successful.

Depending on when China's new coal policy goes into effect, it could shutter 47 planned power plants in 20 developing countries that use the fuel that emits the most heat-trapping gases, about the same amount of coal power as from Germany, according to the European climate think-tank E3G.

"It's a big deal. China was the only significant funder of overseas coal left. This announcement essentially ends all public support for coal globally," said Joanna Lewis, an expert on China, energy and climate at Georgetown University. "This is the announcement many have been waiting for."

From 2013 to 2019, data showed that China was financing 13% of coal-fired power capacity built outside China – "far and away the largest public financier," said Kevin Gallagher, who directs the Boston University center. Japan and South Korea announced earlier this year that they were getting out of the coal-financing business.

With all three countries pulling out of financing coal abroad "that sends a signal to the global economy. This is a sector that's fast becoming a stranded asset," Gallagher said.

While this is a big step it is not quite a death knell for coal, said Byford Tsang, a policy analyst for E3G. That's because China last year added as much new coal power domestically as was just potentially canceled abroad, he said.

Tsang cautioned that the one-sentence line in Xi's speech that mentioned this new policy lacked details like effective dates and whether it applied to private funding as well as public funding.

What also matters is when China stops building new coal plants at home and shutters old ones, Tsang said. That will be part of a push in the G-20 meetings in Italy next month, he said. "The Chinese are going to respond to international pressure, rather than just American bilateral pressure right now," said Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on China's politics and energy at Villanova University.

"A coal-free energy mix is still decades in the future" because coal power plants typically operate for 50 years or more, said Stanford University environment director Chris Field.

Many nations that are trying to build their economies — including top polluters China and India — have long argued they needed to industrialize with fossil fuels, like developed nations had already done. Starting in 2009 and then with "a grand bargain" in 2015 in Paris, richer nations promised $100 billion a year in financial help to poorer nations to make the switch from dirty to clean fuel, World Resources Institute climate finance expert Joe Thwaites said.

But as of 2019, the richer nations were only providing $80 billion a year, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

So when rich nations like the United States asked poorer ones to do more "it gives any other country a very easy retort," Thwaites said: "'You took out commitments and you haven't delivered on those either.'"

In April, Biden announced he would double the Obama-era financial aid pledge of $2.85 billion a year to $5.7 billion. On Tuesday, he announced that he hopes to double that to $11.4 billion a year starting in 2024, but he does need passage from Congress.

The European Union has been doling out $24.5 billion a year with the European Commission recently upping that to more than $4.7 billion over seven years. "The Europeans are doing a lot more and the Americans are lagging behind," Thwaites said.

He said several studies calculate that based on the U.S. economy, population and carbon pollution, it should be contributing 40% to 47% of the $100 billion fund to be doing its fair share.

But Congressional Republicans aren't convinced. "We shouldn't be contributing to a fund that picks winners and losers and further subsidizes China in the process," said Rep. Garret Graves, R-Louisiana, the ranking Republican on the House Climate Committee.

The time for global grandstanding is over said Princeton University climate science and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer said. "It's what's happening on the ground that matters."

"Accelerating the global phase out of coal is the single most important step" to keeping the Paris agreement's key warming limit within reach, said U.N. chief Guterres.

EL DORADO COUNTY, Calif. —

Thousands of people rushed to get out of South Lake Tahoe as the entire tourist resort city came under evacuation orders and wildfire raced toward the large freshwater lake of Lake Tahoe, which straddles California and Nevada.

Evacuation warnings issued for the resort city of 22,000 on Sunday turned into orders Monday. Vehicles loaded with bikes and camping gear and hauling boats snaked through thick, brown air that smelled of a campfire. Police and other emergency vehicles whizzed by.

"This is a systematic evacuation, one neighborhood at a time," South Lake Tahoe police Lt. Travis Cabral said on social media. "I am asking you as our community to please remain calm."

The new orders come a day after communities several miles south of the lake were abruptly ordered evacuated as the Caldor Fire raged nearby.

Watch above sister station KCRA's live, ongoing coverage of the Caldor Fire

South Lake Tahoe's main medical facility, Barton Memorial Hospital, proactively evacuated 36 patients needing skilled nursing and 16 in acute care beds Sunday, sending them to regional facilities far from the fire, public information officer Mindi Befu said. The rest of the hospital was evacuating following Monday's expanded orders.

The entire Lake Tahoe area in the Sierra Nevada mountains is a recreational paradise for San Francisco Bay Area locals looking for a weekend getaway, as well as a national destination. The area offers beaches, water sports, hiking, ski resorts and golfing.

South Lake Tahoe, at the southern end of the lake, bustles with outdoor activities, with casinos available in bordering Stateline, Nevada.

South Lake Tahoe Mayor Tamara Wallace prepared to leave with her husband, youngest child, dogs and items given to them from their deceased parent — objects that can't be replaced.

She did not think the Caldor Fire would come so close. Fires in the past did not spread so rapidly near the resort city.

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Video above: KCRA's Mike TeSelle provides an on-the-ground update of the Caldor Fire

"It's just yet another example of how wildfires have changed over the years," she said. "It's just a culmination of 14 to 18 more years of dead trees, the droughts we’ve had since then, those kinds of things."

The region faces a warning from the National Weather Service about critical fire weather Monday through Tuesday.

The fire destroyed multiple homes Sunday along Highway 50, one of the main routes to the south end of the lake. It also roared through the Sierra-at-Tahoe ski resort, demolishing some buildings but leaving the main buildings at the base intact.

Flames churned through mountains just a few miles southwest of the Tahoe Basin, where thick smoke sent tourists packing at a time when summer vacations would usually be in full swing ahead of the Labor Day weekend.

Video above: Cal Fire chief talks about Caldor Fire's potential threat to Tahoe Basin

Cal Fire Director Thom Porter said during a news conference last week that the Caldor Fire is now, "the No. 1 priority in the nation of fires to get additional and new resources that are becoming available. It is that important."

He added that the fire "is knocking on the door to the Lake Tahoe Basin."

"We have all efforts in place to keep it out of the basin, but we do need to also be aware that that is a possibility based on the way the fires have been burning and the concerns that we have been living in all of these other fires and their growth," Porter said.

"The weather has outstripped and Mother Nature has taken over and taken fires like the Dixie to places that I never thought was possible," he said.

There were reports of cabins burned in the unincorporated community of Echo Lake, where Tom Fashinell has operated Echo Chalet with his wife since 1984. The summer-only resort offers cabin rentals but was ordered to close early for the season by the U.S. Forest Service due to ongoing wildfires.

Fashinell said he was glued to local television. "We're watching to see whether the building survives," he said.

The last major blaze in the area took South Lake Tahoe by surprise after blowing up from an illegal campfire in the summer of 2007. The Angora Fire burned less than 5 square miles but destroyed 254 homes, injured three people and forced 2,000 people to flee.

The Caldor Fire has scorched 277 square miles since breaking out Aug. 14. After the weekend's fierce burning, containment dropped from 19% to 14%. More than 600 structures have been destroyed, and at least 20,000 more were threatened.

Video above: A look at the Grizzly Flats neighborhood damaged in El Dorado County by the Caldor Fire

It's among nearly 90 large blazes in the U.S. Many are in the West, burning trees and brush sucked dry by drought. Climate change has made the region warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more destructive, according to scientists.

In California alone, more than a dozen large fires are being fought by more than 15,200 firefighters. Flames have destroyed about 2,000 buildings and forced thousands to evacuate this year while blanketing large swaths of the West in unhealthy smoke.

In Southern California, a section of Interstate 15 closed Sunday after winds pushed a new blaze, the Railroad Fire, across lanes in the Cajon Pass northeast of Los Angeles.

Farther south, evacuation orders and warnings were in place for remote communities after a wildfire ignited and spread quickly through the Cleveland National Forest on Saturday. A firefighter received minor injuries, and two structures were destroyed in the 2.3-square-mile Chaparral Fire burning along the border of San Diego and Riverside counties, according to Cal Fire. It was 13% contained Monday.

Meanwhile, the Dixie Fire, the second-largest in state history at 1,205 square miles, was nearly halfway contained about 65 miles north of the Lake Tahoe-area blaze. Nearly 700 homes were among almost 1,300 buildings that have been destroyed since the Dixie Fire began in early July.

Containment increased to 26% on the French Fire, which covered nearly 40 square miles (104 square kilometers) in the southern Sierra Nevada. Crews protected forest homes on the west side of Lake Isabella, a popular recreation area northeast of Bakersfield.

The U.S. Department of Defense is sending 200 Army soldiers from Washington state to help firefighters in Northern California, the U.S. Army North said in a statement Saturday. Eight Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve C-130 aircraft capable of dropping thousands of gallons of fire retardant also have been sent to fight wildfires in the West.

El Dorado County officials launched a structure damage map so people can see the status of the homes in the area. The map is updated daily at 9 a.m. Check out the map below.

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Hearst station KCRA and Associated Press writer Janie Har contributed from San Francisco.

Longtime Tahoe area resident Mel Smothers played his violin while being stuck in two hours of eastbound evacuation traffic on Highway 50 after mandatory evacuation orders were issued to all of South Lake Tahoe.Traffic was backed up Monday afternoon for miles along Highway 50 as drivers were making their way out of the South Lake Tahoe area eastbound toward the Nevada state line to escape the encroaching Caldor Fire.CHP South Lake Tahoe officer Ruth Loehr urged those sitting in traffic to “have some patience. We’re doing all we can to open up another route.” Video credit: Alvin Jornada / San Francisco Chronicle