Stretch of I-5 remains closed as wildfire roars
SHASTA-TRINITY NATIONAL
A stretch FOREST, CALIF. — of a major highway near the California-Oregon border will remain closed through the weekend as crews try to tame a roaring wildfire burning on both sides of the north-south route, authorities announced Friday.
The blaze that shut down Interstate 5 on Wednesday was still burning out of control, said Denise Yergenson, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Transportation.
“There is active fire close to the highway,” she said. “There is lots of damage, lots of emergency personnel. It’s just not a safe situation.”
Officials on Sunday will re-evaluate whether to reopen the route that traverses the entire West Coast from Mexico to Canada and usually swarms with trucks and traffic.
It was a ghost road along a 45-mile stretch where fire swept down two days earlier and turned hills on either side into walls of flame. Drivers fled in terror and several big-rigs burned Wednesday.
Before the highway is reopened, authorities have to check the safety of the pavement and cut down burned trees next to the road — some of them 70 feet tall — that might be in danger of falling down.
The fire had burned more than 34 square miles of timber and brush and prompted evacuation orders for scattered homes and buildings in three counties in and around the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. At times, flames shot up 300 feet high.
Although the fire wasn’t burning near any large towns, fire spokesman Brandon Vacarro said about 280 homes were considered threatened. There were some reports that homes had burned but Vacarro could only confirm that an outbuilding and two mixeduse commercial and residential buildings had been damaged.
Meanwhile, truckers who rely heavily on the I-5 to transport timber and other goods along the West Coast had the unenviable choice of waiting or taking a jammed detour that added 115 miles or so to their journeys.
“The road is essentially all two lanes on that journey and there’s some steep hills on there as well so obviously slow-moving trucks going up and down the hill is making it hard to travel,” Vacarro said.
Patience was running thin at the Pilot Travel Center in the town of Weed, near the northern end of the closure. The truck stop’s facilities were stretched to their limits, cashier Jacob Chapman said Thursday afternoon. Parked big rigs lined the roads surrounding the facility.
“It’s been ridiculously congested,” Chapman said. “A lot of the truckers are upset. They’re just stuck, they can’t get through and they’re sick of waiting around.”
The deadly Carr Fire and another in the Mendocino area — the two largest blazes in the state this year — destroyed or damaged 8,800 homes and 329 businesses, Insurance Commissioner David Jones said.