Two of California’s fastestburning wildfires in decades overtook several Northern California towns, destroying more than 180 homes and sending residents fleeing Sunday on highways lined with buildings, guardrails and cars still in flames.
Advertisement
Driven by high winds and soaring temperatures, the Valley Fire in southern Lake County has grown to 25,000 acres (10,117 hectares), CAL FIRE spokesman Daniel Berlant said on Twitter.
Families took what they could as the flames raced toward them, but many memories were left in ashes as 400 homes burned, fire officials said.
The fire broke out Saturday afternoon and exploded in size within hours.
The Valley Fire erupted over the weekend, 110 miles west of Sacramento.
Thousands of evacuees from Middletown, Cobb, Hidden Valley Lake and the Harbin Hot Springs were forced to seek shelter in friends’ homes and restaurants in Kelseyville and Calistoga.
Four firefighters were hospitalized with second-degree burns in the early hours of the blaze and were listed in stable condition on Sunday, but no other casualties were reported, Head said. Residents said there were burned buildings in downtown, but the heaviest damage was farther out, where homes and apartment complexes were destroyed.
“The house next to mine is gone”, he said.
And that’s not even counting the federal spending on fighting fires.
The blazing inferno consists of two fires – the Valley Fire and the Rough Fire, both of which continue to gain ground as at least 5,000 firefighters try to extinguish the fast-spreading flames.
The costs of containing other fires, such as those now burning in Sierra Nevada forests, are largely covered by federal agencies and not included in those figures.
The UC Davis Medical Centre, to where the injured firefighters were airlifted, confirmed the admission of the men but would not comment on their condition.
The Butte Fire burning in Calaveras and Amador Counties has now burned 71,063 acres and is 30 percent contained.
Citing the widespread destruction, Governor Jerry Brown on Sunday declared a state of emergency for Lake and Napa counties – wine-producing regions north of San Francisco. Its 1,500 residents had already been ordered to evacuate.
Advertisement
After a briefing on the Butte blaze, the governor’s emergency services chief said this summer’s fires were the most volatile he had ever seen. In late July, a wildfire east of Clear Lake destroyed 43 homes as it spread across 109 square miles. Firefighters on Saturday intentionally set low-intensity fires in a famed grove of giant sequoia trees in Kings Canyon National Park to remove vegetation and protect the grove from the wildfire, Schwarber said.
