© Ryan Sabalow/The Sacramento Bee/TNS Firefighters battle flames at a home burned by the Mill Fire near Weed, Calif., on Friday, Sept. 2, 2022. The wildfire erupted at a timber mill near the town of Weed in Siskiyou County on Friday, prompting evacuations across a wide area and closing Highway 97.
A fast-moving wildfire exploded in the Siskiyou County city of Weed on Friday, forcing the evacuation of more than 5,000 residents, destroying several homes and sending several residents to the hospital.
The Mill Fire had grown to 2,580 acres by Friday evening, said Cal Fire spokeswoman Suzi Brady, as blistering hot weather blanketed the West and prompted a National Weather Service red flag warning for much of the northern Sacramento Valley. Fanned by strong winds, the fire has moved beyond Weed toward the community of Lake Shastina, where residents were told to evacuate.
© Ryan Sabalow/The Sacramento Bee/TNS Flames and debris are seen in the Mill Fire near Weed, Calif., on Friday, Sept. 2, 2022. A wildfire erupted at a timber mill near the town of Weed in Siskiyou County on Friday, prompting evacuations across a wide area and closing Highway 97.
“We did have some civilians injured and transported to a local hospital,” Brady said. She had no information on the number of people hurt or the extent of their injuries.
Weed City Councilman Bob Hall said it appeared “we lost quite a few homes” in the Lincoln Heights section of Weed. “It came through really fast.”
While the fire had turned northwest, away from Weed, people in the region were anxious about the damage that could occur. “We’ve got people on the other side of the wind,” the councilman said. “On the other side of the wind, it’s hell.”
No containment was reported at 6 p.m. Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for Siskiyou County and announced that the state had secured a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant to help Cal Fire and other agencies fight the Mill Fire.
It was the eighth significant fire to hit the northern extremes of California this summer, including the deadly McKinney Fire. The 60,000-acre blaze, which burned in the Klamath National Forest farther west in Siskiyou County, ignited in July and killed four people while destroying 200 structures.
Another wildfire, the Six Rivers Lightning Complex about 70 miles southwest in Trinity and Humboldt counties’ rugged hardwoods, was still burning after nearly a month. U.S. Forest Service crews were reporting that fire as 64% contained.
While the cause of the Mill Fire wasn’t known, Weed Mayor Kim Greene said it was believed to have started in the area around Roseburg Forest Products, a lumber mill that suffered extensive damage in the 2014 Boles Fire. A Roseburg spokeswoman confirmed that part of the company’s property was burning, but she said company officials didn’t know how or exactly where the fire started.
The fire was reported at 12:49 p.m. as Cal Fire cameras connected to the AlertWildfire Network showed a very large plume of smoke near Weed, a city of about 2,600 people located along Interstate 5, 50 miles south of the Oregon border.
All of Weed — which suffered significant damage in the fire eight years ago — was ordered evacuated. Numerous mandatory evacuations were ordered in and around the vicinity, according to the Siskiyou County Zonehaven webpage. The mandatory zones include the region west of Interstate 5, west of Highway 97, south of Siskiyou County Highway 12A and Weed and the areas immediately north.
Carrick, a town of about 150 people on the east side of Highway 97 between Weed and Lake Shastina, was also ordered to evacuate shortly after 3 p.m. By 6 p.m., it appeared Carrick had been mostly spared as flames burned north and bypassed the former logging hamlet. The Mill Fire was, by 6 p.m., burning between Edgewood and Lake Shastina.
Firefighters were battling flames burning through brush and juniper trees on a hillside on the edge of a housing subdivision in Lake Shastina. The firefighters were trying to prevent further damage on nearby homes.
Embers had drifted and dropped on at least five homes that were still standing but damaged by flames. Rooftops were colored pink after aircraft had blanketed the homes with fire retardant.
As crews worked to battle the blaze, first responders found themselves facing off with residents refusing to evacuate their homes, a common issue during wildfires.
One first-responder found two people at a home and urged them to leave without success. “I’m going to make one more attempt to persuade them to save their lives, and then I’m going to have to leave,” he reported over radio dispatch. Another reported he had tried to get a man to leave twice, but the resident said he would do so only after finding his cats.
A temporary evacuation shelter was initially set up at the Siskiyou County Fairgrounds, 1712 Fairlane Road, Yreka, which was also being used to shelter evacuees’ livestock and other large animals. Another evacuation center for humans was established at the Karuk Tribe’s wellness center in Yreka, at 1403 Kahtishraam, according to the American Red Cross.
Those wanting authorities to perform checks on their pets or homes, can submit a request to https://www.co.siskiyou.ca.us/animalcontrol/webform/fire-animal-welfare-check-request.
Evacuations expanded by 2 p.m. as areas around Lake Shastina, Big Springs and as far north as Grenada along Interstate 5 were given the orders to leave, and again just after 3 p.m. to include all of Carrick. Cal Fire said students at Weed High School were bused to Mount Shasta High School for pickup.
A second fire — the Mountain Fire — erupted near the Gazelle Mountain area west of Interstate 5 hours after the Mill Fire began, and firefighters diverted six air tankers to that area, according to radio dispatch. The Mountain Fire prompted evacuation warnings in two zones: SIS-5203 and SIS-2337.
By 6 p.m., Cal Fire Siskiyou unit reported the Mountain Fire had burned about 300 acres of timber and was crowning. There was no containment on the wildfire burning about 8 miles southeast of the town of Gazelle.
Brady, the Cal Fire spokeswoman, said the fire had spread to around 300 acres by early evening and was burning through a heavily wooded area.
“We’ve got a mess here,” one dispatcher on the Mill Fire reported. “We’ll try to break away some tankers, but this is the priority right now.”
div.embed-infographic > figure > h3{ font-size: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 5px; } div.embed-infographic > figure > figcaption{ padding: 0px 0px 10px 0px; max-width: 884px; } div.embed-infographic > figure > iframe{ border:0; } div.embed-infographic > figure > h6{ text-transform: none; font-weight: 500; color: #707070; margin-top: 8px; } .index-pop { position: absolute; right: 10px; line-height: 1.5em; } .index-pop svg { text-decoration: none !important; margin-left: 0.3em; position: relative; top: 3px; }
Lincoln Heights neighborhood decimated
Although Weed, a historic lumber town 200 miles north of Sacramento, was evacuated, some residents were huddled in the center of the city Friday afternoon as a massive plume of smoke rose in the background.
Helicopters were dropping water from above. Strong winds were blowing north, away from the town and toward the area where the Lava Fire burned 26,000 acres northeast of Weed a year ago.
“It just seems like it never stops,” said Weed resident Scott Payne, 59, recalling the Lava and Boles fires from years past.
Powerful winds blowing from south to north were shaking trees in town as a dark plume of smoke rose above the Carrick and Lincoln Heights subdivisions, which are split off from the city by the Roseburg mill property.
Flames destroyed most of the homes and melted parked vehicles in the Lincoln Heights subdivision. Some homes there only had their chimneys still standing.
Payne said his son Adam went to get his belongings from his home in nearby Carrick and reported seeing 50-foot-high flames over Highway 97, one of the main thoroughfares.
Don Dixon was at the Ray’s Food Place grocery store in Weed, stroking a puppy in his arms, as he tried to figure out a way to get back to his property, though it seemed unlikely given the roadblocks.
His place is an undeveloped lot that burned in the Lava Fire, destroying several vehicles.
He did not seem terribly worried that the fire was going to torch his place a second time.
“Ain’t no way we have to worry about it burning again,” he said.
Dixon remained calm.
“Fires happen.”
Casey Coppi and his father, Robert, were standing on Casey’s driveway in Edgewood, watching flames torch the junipers on the hills above a quarter-mile wide grass hay field that was green from being irrigated.
The men hoped the grassy buffer and the wind direction would save their home.
Casey Coppi said his wife, Hallie, and their three children had already evacuated with their pets to Yreka, 25 miles north. They got stuck at their driveway for several minutes after two cars had a minor crash on the road outside the home, likely due to frantic evacuees trying to escape Lake Shastina, he said.
They’re staying for now but won’t take any chances if the wind starts blowing west.
“If this column starts shifting right at us, we would leave,” Casey Coppi said.
‘I got out of there’: Weed mayor among evacuees
“Right now we just got an evacuation order for all of Weed,” Mayor Kim Greene said at 1:50 p.m., as she was packing her belongings into her car at home. “It’s burning north. I live on the south end but we’re putting stuff in the car.
“What I can see right now is just a lot of black smoke. They’ve brought in tankers, so there’s planes coming.”
Greene said she was in the Weed community center when someone reported the fire, and people immediately evacuated. Greene said she saw flames heading toward the driveway of a home nearby, but did not see whether any had burned before she left.
“I got out of there but the flames were right at the driveway,” she said.
The mayor said the fire apparently began near the Roseburg mill, which employs about 140 workers. A Sacramento Bee reporter at the scene saw at least one building at the mill complex had been destroyed.
“It burned part of the old mill,” Greene said. “Now, whether it’s burned across to the mill I don’t know.”
Weed Councilwoman Sue Tavalero, whose home was destroyed in a Sept. 15, 2014, blaze, was in Medford, Oregon, when the fire erupted Friday, but said she had been told that the central part of Weed appeared to have been spared and that the fire was burning north as it was pushed by winds.
“Downtown, I’m pretty sure, is fine,” Tavalero said. “My house is fine.”
Power remained out in the area at sunset. Pacific Power, which serves the region, reported 7,625 homes and businesses without power near Weed around 1 p.m.
Steven Buscher was driving through Weed when the emergency broadcast system began sounding on his cellphone and “what sounded like loudspeakers telling everybody to evacuate the area immediately,” he said.
“The power was off at all buildings and facilities including gas stations and stop lights,” he said, adding the power also appeared to be off throughout nearby Mount Shasta. Buscher, a resident of Hawaii, had been vacationing in the region the past two months.
“I just happened to be driving through the city of Weed when everything happened,” he said.
Caltrans said a nearly 40-mile stretch of Highway 97, between Highway 265 junction in Weed through just south of the town of Macdoel, was closed due to the Mill Fire.
Roseburg mill has burned before
The Mill Fire is the largest fire in Weed since the Boles Fire destroyed 165 homes and other buildings in September 2014.
While that fire only burned through 516 acres, it took out roughly one-third of the town’s housing stock and destroyed some major businesses, such as Roseburg Forest Products’ wood-veneer facility.
The Roseburg mill reopened after nine months but found itself in the thick of the flames again.
“It is burning on our property as well as surrounding areas,” said Rebecca Taylor, a spokeswoman at the company’s headquarters in Oregon. “We don’t know how or where it started.” She added that “the plant is evacuated except for our fire patrol.”
Photos on social media from photographers near the mill are showing a conflagration amid a timber cache. The fire appears to be burning very hot, according to heat signatures being observed from the GOES-West satellite.
Shelly Burgess, who lives in the Angel Valley area of town not far from the Roseburg mill, said: “We looked out the window and saw a plume of smoke.”
Before long she had gathered her grandchildren and other relatives and “we piled everybody in the car. … The high winds — you’ve got to move fast. You’ve got to get out of there fast. We’ve been through the Boles Fire.”
She drove her family to Yreka to look for a place to stay. Although she believes her house wasn’t burned, her stepdaughter Rachel Grili lost her home.
City rebuilt, wildfires persist
Ron Stock was the city administrator in Weed when the Boles Fire roared through. By the time he retired in 2020, he said all of the damaged infrastructure and roughly two-thirds of the destroyed homes had been replaced.
”We were on track for a full recovery,” Stock said Friday afternoon in a phone interview from his home in Minnesota, where he was checking Facebook and watching videos posted from within the town.
Weed officials had prevention in mind after the Boles Fire. Besides better radio communication and a modernized hazard response playbook, the officials decided to surround the city with defensible space — a buffer of sorts intended to stop fires from rolling into town.
”We built a 150-foot safety area around the entire community,” Stock said. “But of course, it doesn’t help when the fire starts in the middle of town.”
The Bee’s Ryan Lillis, Jason Pohl, Hahn Truong and Rosalio Ahumada contributed to this story.
©2022 The Sacramento Bee. Visit sacbee.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.