East Bay blazes ignite as fierce fire season plagues state.
A 500-acre grass fire burning on both sides of Interstate 580 in the Altamont Pass shut down the freeway in both directions for several hours Sunday evening and prompted some motorists to flee by driving in the wrong direction along the shoulders of the gridlocked road.
The California Highway Patrol reopened the westbound lanes around 9:30 p.m. and reopened the eastbound side about an hour later.
“We were totally gridlocked. It was a freefor-all,” said Joe O’Connor of Menlo Park, who drove back from Yosemite National Park on Sunday evening with his wife, Jessica Yurasek. They got off the freeway at the Altamont Pass off-ramp.
They described grass fires on both sides of the highway, with much of the hillside burned black.
“We could feel the heat from inside the car,” Yurasek said.
The Grant Fire was first reported at 5:38 p.m. near Grant Line Road in Alameda County. The fire was 20 percent contained Sunday night, according to the Alameda County Fire
Department.
Drivers in the area reported thick smoke and flames along both sides of the freeway. Some were forced to turn around before the Altamont Pass.
Chronicle reporter Erin Allday was returning to the Bay Area with her sister and brother-in-law Sunday afternoon after visiting her parents in Arnold (Calaveras County) when they saw smoke in the distance, near the pass.
“It didn’t look very big, and I certainly didn’t think the fire would be right on top of the freeway,” she said.
Then traffic in the westbound lanes came to a stop. Some drivers tried to flee by going the wrong way on the interstate’s shoulders.
“People started turning around and going the opposite direction on the freeway, and that’s never a good sign,” Allday said. “It was pretty chaotic.”
She and her companions decided to drive forward instead. Soon they were passing through flames on both sides of the road.
“They weren’t very high flames, but they were right at the edge of the freeway, and you could feel the heat,” Allday said. “You could actually hear the crackling.”
From the size of the burned area on the hills, it looked like the fire had been burning for some time, she said. It took about a minute to drive through the flames. On the other side, they saw eastbound traffic backed up for perhaps 5 miles, Allday said.
Earlier Sunday a grass fire ignited east of San Ramon and quickly scorched 56 acres. The fire was first reported around 4:45 p.m. in the vicinity of Bruce Drive and Joseph Lane in the Tassajara area, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. It was 90 percent contained by 7:30 p.m.
A third blaze Sunday evening, a five-acre vegetation fire in Vallejo, led officials to ask that nearby residents stay sheltered indoors. It was fully contained by 9 p.m.