A powerful wildfire in Northern California incinerated most of a town of about 30,000 people with flames that moved so fast there was nothing firefighters could do, authorities said Friday. Nine people died, including five who were found in their burned-out vehicles.
Only a day after it began, the blaze near the town of Paradise had grown to nearly 140 square miles, had destroyed more than 6,700 structures -- almost all of them homes -- and was burning out of control.
"There was really no firefight involved," Capt. Scott McLean of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said, explaining that crews gave up attacking the flames and instead helped people escape them. "These firefighters were in the rescue mode all day yesterday."
With fires also burning in Southern California, state officials put the total number of people forced from their homes at about 250,000. Evacuation orders included the entire city of Malibu, which is home to 13,000 people, among them some of Hollywood's biggest stars.
President Donald Trump issued an emergency declaration providing federal funds for Butte, Ventura and Los Angeles counties.
When Paradise was evacuated, the order set off a desperate exodus in which many motorists got stuck in gridlocked traffic and abandoned their vehicles to flee on foot. People reported seeing much of the community go up in flames, including homes, supermarkets, businesses, restaurants, schools and a retirement center.
Rural areas fared little better. Many homes have propane tanks that were exploding in the flames. "They were going off like bombs," said Karen Auday, who escaped to a nearby town.
McLean estimated that the lost buildings numbered in the thousands in Paradise, about 180 miles northeast of San Francisco.
"Pretty much the community of Paradise is destroyed. It's that kind of devastation," he said.
While the cause of the fire wasn't known, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. told state regulators it experienced a failure on an electrical transmission line near Paradise about 15 minutes before the blaze broke out. The utility said it later noticed damage at a transmission tower near the town.
The blaze spread north Friday, prompting officials to order the evacuation of Stirling City and Inskip, two communities north of Paradise along the Sierra Nevada foothills.
The wind-driven flames also spread to the west and reached Chico, a city of 90,000 people. Firefighters were able to stop the fire at the edge of the city, said Capt. Bill Murphy of the fire protection agency.
Firefighters have struggled to overcome the natural barrier of steep terrain in burn areas. That forced officials to take to the skies to battle the blazes with flame retardants, much of it dispersed by gusts that topped 40 mph.
"We're doing our best to attack this fire from the air, but extreme winds prohibits our ability," Ventura County Fire Capt. Stan Ziegler said.
The fires have bracketed Thousand Oaks, where a gunman entered the Borderline Bar & Grill on Wednesday night and killed 12 people before killing himself.
"It's devastating. It's like 'welcome to hell,'" resident Cynthia Ball said about the disasters outside a teen center that is serving as a shelter for evacuees. "I don't even know what to say. It's like we're all walking around kind of in a trance."
A day earlier, the facility had been the location where grieving family members had gathered and received the grim news on the fate of loved ones who had not returned from the Borderline Bar & Grill.
FLEEING IN PANIC
There were no signs of life Friday on the road to Paradise except for the occasional bird chirp. A thick, yellow haze from the fire hung in the air and gave the appearance of twilight in the middle of the day.
Strong winds had blown the blackened needles on some evergreens straight to one side. A scorched car with its doors open sat on the shoulder.
At one burned-out house, flames still smoldered inside what appeared to be a weight room. The rubble included a pair of dumbbells with the rubber melted off and the skeletons of a metal pull-up bar and other exercise equipment. The grass and elaborate landscaping all around the brick-and-stucco home remained an emerald green. Red pool umbrellas were furled near lounge chairs and showed not a singe on them.
Evacuees from Paradise sat in stunned silence Friday outside a Chico church where they took refuge the night before. They all had harrowing tales of a slow-motion escape from a fire so close they could feel the heat inside their vehicles as they sat stuck in a terrifying traffic jam.
When the order came to evacuate, it was like the entire town of 27,000 residents decided to leave at once, they said. Fire surrounded the evacuation route, and drivers panicked. Some crashed and others left their vehicles by the roadside.
"It was just a wall of fire on each side of us, and we could hardly see the road in front of us," police officer Mark Bass said.
A nurse called Rita Miller on Thursday morning, telling her she had to get her disabled mother, who lives a few blocks away, and flee Paradise immediately. Miller jumped in her boyfriend's rickety pickup, which was low on gas and equipped with a bad transmission. She instantly found herself stuck in gridlock.
"I was frantic," she said. After an hour of no movement, she abandoned the truck and decided to try her luck on foot. While walking, a stranger in the traffic jam rolled down her window and asked Miller if she needed help. Miller at first scoffed at the notion of getting back in a vehicle. Then she reconsidered, thinking: "I'm really scared. This is terrifying. I can't breathe. I can't see, and maybe I should humble myself and get in this woman's car."
The stranger helped Miller pack up her mother and took them to safety in Chico. It took three hours to travel the 14 miles.
At the Vallecito mobile home park for senior citizens in Ventura County, the fire arrived so quickly that residents had no time to gather medications and documents. With flames bearing down, firefighters carried people from homes and put them in empty seats of their neighbors' cars, said Carol Napoli, 74.
Napoli left with her friend, the friend's son and her mother who is in her 90s and had to leave behind her oxygen tank.
"We drove through flames to get out. They had us in like a caravan," Napoli said. "My girlfriend was driving. She said, 'I don't know if I can do this.' Her son said, 'Mom you have to, you have to drive through the flames.'"
Concerned friends and family members posted anxious messages on Twitter and other sites, saying they were looking for loved ones, particularly senior citizens who lived at retirement homes or alone.
About 20 of the same deputies who were helping to find and rescue people lost their own homes, Sheriff Kory Honea said.
"There are times when you have such rapid-moving fires ... no amount of planning is going to result in a perfect scenario, and that's what we had to deal with here," Honea told the Action News Network.
Kelly Lee called shelters looking for her husband's 93-year-old grandmother, Dorothy Herrera, who was last heard from Thursday morning. Herrera, who lives in Paradise with her 88-year-old husband, Lou, left a frantic voice mail around 9:30 a.m. saying they needed to get out.
"We never heard from them again," Lee said. "We're worried sick. ... They do have a car, but they both are older and can be confused at times."
The missing included Richard Wayne Johnson and his wife, Suzanne, who lived in an RV park in Paradise that burned, according to his daughter Dawn Johnson of Independent, Ore.
"He has Stage 4 prostate cancer. She's in her 70s and mostly confined to her bed due to fibromyalgia," Johnson said. "I would be very surprised if they had gas in their car to leave."
She said the couple moved from Texas to the California foothill town about a year ago and were probably not prepared for wildfires.
Johnson said she has not been able to reach them by cellphone, and members of the couple's Jehovah's Witnesses Kingdom Hall in Paradise told her they have not seen them at local shelters.
"I checked all over," she said. "Red Cross, anything you can think of I've tried to do."
Information for this article was contributed by Don Thompson, Gillian Flaccus, Paul Elias, Jocelyn Gecker, Janie Har, Daisy Nguyen, Olga R. Rodriguez, Sudhin Thanawala, Jonathan J. Cooper, Brian Melley, Juliet Williams, Amanda Lee Myers and John Antczak of The Associated Press; by Joel Achenbach, Katie Zezima and Alex Horton of The Washington Post; and by Kirk Johnson and Matt Stevens of The New York Times.
A Section on 11/10/2018