Blaze: Massive, fast-moving wildfire has destroyed more than 6,450 homes
BUTTE COUNTY >> Towering flames whipped by gale-force winds and fueled by bone-dry brush killed at least nine people who were trapped or trying to flee a wildfire that erupted with explosive speed and incinerated the Gold Rush town of Paradise east of Chico, authorities said Friday.
Dozens more people remained unaccounted for as the Camp Fire continued to burn toward the outskirts of Chico in Butte County,
forcing more than 50,000 evacuations and closing schools for an estimated two weeks. In a flash, it became the most destructive fire in California history, destroying more than 6,450 homes.
Smoke from the fire cast an orange haze over Chico and wafted south to the Bay Area where it prompted health warnings and the cancellation of high school football games.
Two other fast-growing critical wildfires in Ventura and Los Angeles counties prompted more than 105,000 evacuations, including celebrities, as the flames threatened Malibu and burned a historic movie site recently used by the HBO series “Westworld.”
The apocalyptic scenes spreading across California have reignited the state’s second consecutive relentless wildfire season, just four months after the Carr fire killed seven people in Redding and a little more than a year since the Wine Country fires posted a death toll of more than 40.
“The magnitude of the destruction that we are seeing is really, again, unbelievable and heartbreaking, and our hearts go out to everybody who has been affected by this and impacted,” state Office of Emergency Services Director Mark Ghilarducci said Friday.
In Butte County, Sheriff-Coroner Kory L. Honea reported five people were found dead in or near vehicles as they tried Thursday to escape the devastated town of Paradise. Their bodies were too badly burned to identify yet. Four more bodies were discovered later Friday — three outside a structure and the other inside a house.
Ghilarducci said firefighters and officers were so busy trying to fight the rapidly growing infernos and evacuating residents that they don’t yet know the extent of the loss of life and property.
“Pretty much the community of Paradise is destroyed,” said Cal Fire Capt. Scott McLean.
Several other earlier fires continued to smolder statewide, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said. The 35-acre Brushy fire in Mendocino County east of Highway 101 was 50 percent contained, and the 17acre Rincon fire off Highway 9 north of Santa Cruz was 90 percent contained.
But it is the massive Camp fire that burned Paradise, 12 miles east of Chico, as well as the Hill and Woolsey fires in Southern California that state officials called “critical.”
The Camp fire started around 6:30 a.m. Thursday and nearly quadrupled overnight to at least 90,000 acres Friday — an astonishing rate of growth. By nightfall, it was still only 5 percent contained. The fire scorched 140 square miles — nearly three times the size of San Francisco — destroyed about 6,450 homes and 260 commercial buildings and was threatening thousands more. The destruction topped last year’s Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa, which had destroyed 5,636 structures, the most in state history until this week.
Authorities said it was still too early to say what sparked the deadly blaze, but firefighters found “power lines down” along a PG&E transmission line near the origin of the fire, according to a Bay Area News Group review of firefighter radio transmissions.
Charred homes, businesses and vehicles lined the streets of Paradise Friday as residents who fled for their lives to evacuation centers in Chico recalled harrowing escapes as the flames bore down and detonated propane gas tanks.
“I’ve never seen anything else like it,” said Johnny Dykes, 62, who rode his motorcycle on sidewalks to get around traffic and motor through walls of flame that flanked the road to get to safety in Chico.
On Friday, burned shells of abandoned automobiles packed with belongings sat in the middle of roads in Paradise, where brick chimneys were all that the fire had left of many homes. The blaze also destroyed the historic Honey Run Covered Bridge that connects Chico and Paradise.
By Friday, more than 1,300 people were in shelters. Dozens of names were still listed as missing Friday morning on a board at the Neighborhood Church of Chico, an evacuation shelter. Family members anxiously waited for loved ones, the lucky ones exchanging hugs when they arrived. Others simply had nowhere else to go. Many wondered when they would be able to get back to their homes, but they also doubted there would be homes to go back to.
“We lost everything” — wedding album, children’s photos — said Sharron Metcalf, 70. “It was so fast, it was more like we had to think of basically getting out and surviving than to grab everything.”
She and her husband, Richard, had just moved from Utah five months ago to Paradise, where they were raising Arabian show horses on 7 1/2 acres of what she called “our absolute dream property.” He noticed worrisome smoke around 9 a.m. Thursday and called 911. When he told the dispatcher he lived in Paradise, she told him to “get out now.”
They opened their gate to let their horses run, grabbed IDs, laptop computers and left in their four-wheel-drive, only to hit a traffic jam of evacuating neighbors.
The couple drove over a paved bicycle path to get around some of the gridlock as trees exploded and guardrail posts caught fire. It took them five hours to escape and they ultimately ended up at a hotel in Sacramento, not knowing whether their home or horses survived.
In Southern California, the Hill fire burned 4,500 acres in Ventura County’s Santa Rosa Valley, prompting evacuation of 15,000 residents as well as the Point Mugu Naval Base and the Cal State Channel Islands university campus. Ventura County Fire Department spokesman Rich Macklin said the fire swept southwest and crossed Highway 101 in just 12 to 15 minutes after it ignited. It was 15 percent contained Friday night.
“Extreme fire behavior, extreme winds — resources couldn’t even get in front of it,” Macklin said at a news briefing Friday. “It was all about getting people out of the path of the fire. We weren’t even engaging the fire.”
Ventura County fire spokesman Brian McGrath said that the Woolsey fire south of Simi Valley has charred 35,000 acres. It prompted the evacuation of Malibu, forcing celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Alyssa Milano to flee, and burned the home of Caitlyn Jenner.
In the Bay Area, smoke from the Camp fire cast a thick haze, obscuring the foothills on both sides of
the bay and prompting county health officials to warn residents to stay indoors with the windows closed if possible. An unprecedented three-fourths of high school football playoff games were postponed until Monday because of unhealthy air.
State officials said that unfavorable weather conditions helped fuel the rapid growth of fires up and down the state: A combination of tinder-dry vegetation that hasn’t seen rain in months, low humidity and powerful, dry offshore winds.
And the pattern is expected to continue into next week, they warned.
“We have red-flag conditions, critical fire weather across all of California,” Cal Fire Director Ken Pimlott said. “We are basically looking at a very significant, dangerous weather pattern through this next week.”
Pimlott said more than 6,000 firefighters are deployed across the state to tamp down the flames, as well as every available aircraft. There are 1,860 “mutual aid” firefighters, many from the Bay Area, responding from local fire departments to the fires throughout the state, with 500 fire engines and hundreds of law enforcement officers.
The California National Guard has deployed 185 personnel primarily to the Camp fire area to help with aircraft, satellite imagery and evacuation assistance, said Adjutant Gen. David Baldwin.
But the winds and smoke hinder the use and effectiveness of the aircraft, Pimlott said. State officials have requested firefighting assistance from other Western states.
Acting Gov. and Gov.elect Gavin Newsom has declared states of emergency for Butte, Ventura and Los Angeles counties, and requested federal assistance.
State officials said local authorities did their best to get the word out quickly to residents to evacuate out of harm’s way, even going door to door as the fire spread quickly.
Paradise is no stranger to wildfires — the 2008 Humboldt fire burned 74 homes in the community — and was prepared when the order came to evacuate.
“But understand how quickly that fire has been spreading,” Pimlott said of Thursday’s fire. “When the Camp fire started yesterday morning, it was immediately met with 40 mph winds. That fire, from the second it started, was off to the races. It was well off to burning at dangerous rates of spread. These are the kinds of conditions we’re seeing across California.
“We are a long ways from being out of the fire fight.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report. Contact John Woolfolk at 408-920-5782 and Annie Sciacca at 925-943-8073.