MASSIVE BLAZE LIKE A ‘TORNADO’
38,000 EVACUATED; SECOND FIREFIGHTER KILLED, THREE MORE INJURED Inferno: Fire destroys at least 500 structures, scorches 45,000 acres and threatens thousands of homes
REDDING >> Adding a shocking new intensity to California’s already bad summer fire season, a major fire continued to rage out of control Friday in Shasta County, burning homes in Redding neighborhoods and displacing 38,000 people as firefighters toiled in temperatures close to 110 degrees.
The Carr Fire, which began Monday, has killed two firefighters, injured three more, destroyed at least 500 structures, according to officials, scorched nearly 45,000 acres and is threatening thousands of homes across the city.
“It was like a tornado,” said Joyce Cox-Sacco of Redding. “It was so horrific.”
From her home on Amethyst Way, Cox-Sacco watched from a distance Thursday night as firefighters battled the fire on a nearby ridge. But as darkness fell, she said, the fire started advancing quickly toward her house, and she knew she had to leave.
On Friday, Cox-Sacco was boarding up the garage door of her house, which was ripped off, along with the roof, during the fire. The top of her chimney lay across the street, having been swept off by wind or debris as the fire barreled through her neighborhood.
Officials with Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, reiterated Friday the danger facing Red-
ding and the region around the city of 91,000 people. The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for the area through Monday morning, with temperatures as high as a scorching 111 degrees.
“These are extreme conditions,” Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott said during a news conference. “Evacuate. Evacuate. Evacuate. Leave before you are asked to leave.”
The fire continued to spread after police early Friday issued evacuation orders for neighborhoods in the western part of the city. The office of Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko said 38,000 people were ordered to evacuate. Cars clogged roads late Thursday and into Friday. The blaze was only 3 percent contained by midafternoon Friday.
“We’ve seen fire conditions and weather conditions like we’ve never seen before, ” said Mark Ghilarducci, director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “It’s quite an event to stay out in front of.”
Scott McLean, deputy chief of Cal Fire, said the fire was caused by a vehicle towing a trailer, possibly through some kind of mechanical failure. The agency reported that in addition to the 500 structures that were destroyed, about 5,000 were still threatened by the blaze.
Pimlott said 7,000 firefighters were fighting the fire, with reinforcements expected in the days to come.
“It burned into the city limits last night with great velocity,” McLean said. “It caught a lot of people off guard. A lot of people had to be evacuated. It has the potential to take off again.”
The Carr fire is the latest massive blaze to hit California this month. On Tuesday, park officials evacuated thousands of visitors from Yosemite National Park at the height of tourist season.
Although flames from the Ferguson fire, which has been burning since July 13, have not entered the park boundaries, they generated massive amounts of unhealthy smoke and forced the closure of Highway 140, while threatening nearby communities such as Yosemite West and ancient sequoias in Merced Grove near Highway 120.
By midday Friday, the Ferguson fire had burned 45,911 acres. More than 3,800 firefighters with 261 engines, 16 helicopters and 79 bulldozers had the fire 29 percent contained. The National Park Service said that Yosemite Valley will remain closed until 4 p.m. on Friday, August 3, with limited services including campgrounds, lodging and food service being available.
A couple weeks after the Ferguson fire killed a Cal Fire bulldozer operator, whose bulldozer rolled down a steep hill while he worked near the flames at night, the Carr fire also killed a bulldozer operator on Thursday. The news worsened Friday as Cal Fire announced that a Redding fire inspector, Jeremy Stoke, also was killed while battling the fire.
Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday declared a state of emergency in Shasta and Mariposa counties, along with Riverside County, where the Cranston fire had burned 11,500 acres east of Hemet by Friday afternoon, with only 3 percent containment.
This year’s fire season in California is the worst in a decade. Through Thursday night, 289,727 acres — an area roughly 10 times the size of San Francisco — had burned since Jan. 1 on federal, state and private lands, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.
That total is 61 percent more than at this time during the previous 10 years (2008-2017), when 180,076 acres had burned, on average, through July 27.
At least three more months of dangerous fire conditions lay ahead for the state until November, when the first winter rains normally arrive.
The reason that this year is so bad is largely due to the state’s recent five-year drought, said Craig Clements, an associate professor of meteorology at San Jose State University who studies fire conditions.
“It’s the fuels,” said Clements. “The fuels are so dry from the drought and this minimal year of winter precipitation. Because everything is so dry, you get an ignition, and it goes crazy.”
Crazy is what fire crews faced Friday in the western part of Redding, where they set backfires and cut hand lines to stop the spread into other neighborhoods.
“Everybody is working extremely hard,” McLean said. “We are picking our points where we are going to make our stands.”
While Cal Fire crews fought the
blaze, Redding residents tried to make sense of the situation and decide whether they should evacuate the area.
“Things were going haywire,” said Robert Hovey, who surveyed the damage Friday as he rode his bike around his neighborhood. Hovey said he received no emergency alerts on his phone, but his family followed Twitter for updates and heard that evacuations were recommended for west Redding. After seeing 30-foot-high flames less than a mile from his home, Hovey and his girlfriend went to his brother’s house a few miles away in Anderson.
“Everyone was leaving,” Hovey said, adding that traffic was building up on all the roads in the area. “Traffic lights were going out behind us.”
The intensity and unpredictable nature of the fire led to three firefighters suffering burns to their ears, face and hands Thursday night. The three firefighters were attempting to save a structure when they experienced a “sudden blast of heat” from burning vegetation, according to the Marin County Fire Department.
Cal Fire’s McLean said that although the fire had burned homes in suburban neighborhoods, it is different than the Wine Country fires that devastated neighborhoods in Sonoma and Napa counties last October.
Those fires, many of which were started by fallen power lines,
were driven by extremely dry conditions and winds of up to 80 mph that roared in from the north. When the Redding fire exploded out of control Thursday night, the winds were not as strong but changed directions rapidly, causing havoc.
“This fire has been pushed in every which direction by very erratic winds,” he said. “It’s caused very erratic fire conditions, which is very dangerous.”
Firefighters had tried in vain to build containment around the blaze Thursday, but flames kept jumping their lines. Earlier Thursday, with flames exploding around Whiskeytown Lake, an effort to save boats at a marina by untying them from moorings and pushing them to safety wasn’t swift enough to spare them all.
Dozens of charred, twisted and melted boats were among the losses at Oak Bottom Marina.
“The only buildings left standing … right now are the fire station and a couple of restrooms,” said Fire Chief Mike Hebrard of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
In the historic Gold Rush-era town of Shasta, state parks employees worked through the early morning to rescue artifacts from a museum as the blaze advanced.
They were scenes that experts warn Californians will see repeated. There are millions of dead trees, grass and brush across California after recent drought years. Add to that hot conditions, which have been getting increasingly hot due to climate change, particularly at night when fires in the past have died down, and the state faces a crisis, Clements said.
“We should expect more fires in the next three months,” said Clements. “It’s going to be a bad year. But every year is a bad year now.”