A town empties out: Lakeport residents flee the newest threat

LAKEPORT, Lake County — When they yelled “fire” in the theater, it was for real.

Moviegoers at the Lakeport Cinema 5, near the shores of Clear Lake, were watching the sequel to the romantic comedy “Mamma Mia!” this week when fire officials rushed into the playhouse and announced that the town of just over 5,000 residents was being evacuated because of the River Fire.

“We were almost through the movie and they flipped on the lights,” said resident Annette Hopkins, who on Monday had been out of her house for more than 24 hours, staying with friends. “We didn’t even get to see the Cher part.”

As dozens of wildfires ripped across the state this week, the lives of tens of thousands of Californians have been upended in big and small ways.

The latest disruption was to the several communities along the western shore of Clear Lake, where the River Fire was one of two major blazes burning in the hills high above water’s edge.

The fires, dubbed the Mendocino Complex, were the most recent to threaten Lake County, a rural region 100 miles north of San Francisco. Over the past four years, the county has been ravaged by wildfires, the most destructive of them the 2015 Valley Fire that wiped out nearly 1,500 homes and left four dead.

“I’ve been saying that Lakeport is going to be next,” Hopkins said. “We’re the only place here that hasn’t burned.”

The evacuation of town residents Charity and Andrew

Hansen was a bit less hasty, if not anticlimactic. The couple had driven an hour to Santa Rosa on Saturday, the day before their city was declared off-limits, to escape the smoke. Before they could get back in, fire officials had shut them out.

“Our neighbors called to tell us that we’d been evacuated,” said Charity, 40.

Fortunately, their friends broke into the Hansens’ home behind the courthouse before their own departures and grabbed the couple’s two rottweilers, Panzer and Puppyloo.

After reuniting with their dogs, the Hansens set up a tent that they happened to have in the trunk of their car at an evacuation center at Kelseyville High School. Late Monday, they had to uproot again after fire officials ordered an evacuation of Kelseyville and its approximately 3,000 residents. They were directed to evacuation centers in the nearby towns of Lower Lake and Middletown.

Fire officials said Kelseyville, 6 miles south of here, was not in immediate danger, but winds were erratic and things could change.

But in Lakeport, the thought of evacuating was just too much for some.

Kenny Ridgeway, 48, runs a nutritional supplement business on the edge of Lakeport and wasn’t about to risk losing it. He lined up garden hoses and buckets of water behind his warehouses to douse any spot fires that might spark up

from the larger inferno that billowed in the distance.

“If our inventory burns, it would take us six months to a year to replace it,” he said. “I’m not taking any chances.”