Calif. wildfire forces 1,500 to evacuate
Homes, other buildings in path of destruction
SPRING VALLEY, Calif. — A Northern California wildfire that has burned some two dozen homes and buildings gained thousands of acres on Tuesday as it burned through tinder-dry chaparral, and residents forced to flee a tiny rural community had no idea when they can return.
The fire that burned some two dozen homes and other buildings since Saturday continued to threaten about 600 buildings in Lake County north of San Francisco. The entire Spring Valley area was under evacuation orders, state fire officials said.
At least 1,500 people and as many as 3,000 fell into that zone.
State fire officials said highs in the 80s, low humidity and erratic winds pushed the blaze to 13,000 acres on Tuesday and the same weather was expected on Wednesday.
However, fire crews also gained on the blaze, which was 17 percent contained. Some 2,700 firefighters and more than a dozen aircraft fought the flames.
The humidity has been tending to rise at night, dampening the fire’s spread but “sometimes it can actively burn through the night,” warned Anthony Brown with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “Once daylight comes up ... it starts to get dried out again.”
Spring Valley resident Deborah Edwards, 67, was seven hours out of town when her neighbor called to alert her about the mandatory evacuation — the third evacuation order Edwards has had to follow in the past few years. She and her husband drove back to collect their Labradors from an evacuation center where the neighbor had taken them.
“We’ve done this enough times so we can go ahead and go,” she said. “I had all my important papers in a place beforehand so the neighbor knew what to take.”