As California wildfire intensifies, 1,500 are forced to flee their homes
SPRING VALLEY, Calif. — A wildfire in Northern California that forced about 1,500 people to flee their homes grew overnight and was heading toward a sparsely populated area in a region hit hard by wildfires in recent years, authorities said Tuesday.
The fire in Lake County north of San Francisco is now nearly 18 square miles, said Emily Smith, a spokeswoman with California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The blaze burning through dry brush, grass and timber has destroyed 12 homes and 10 other buildings since it started on Saturday. It is threatening another 600 buildings.
Authorities over the weekend said residents had to evacuate all homes in the town of Spring Valley, where about 3,000 people live. Officials clarified Tuesday that only half of the residents faced mandatory evacuation orders.
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.
“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.”
California officials said unusually hot weather, high winds and highly flammable vegetation turned brittle by drought helped fuel several blazes that began over the weekend, the same conditions that led to the state’s deadliest and most destructive fire year in 2017.
The blaze is the latest in the county of just 65,000 people in the last few years. In 2015, a series of fires destroyed 2,000 buildings and killed four people. The following year, an arsonist started a fire that wiped out 300 buildings.