(TNS) - Much of the tiny Plumas County community of Greenville, Calif., was in ruins early Thursday, reduced to ashes by the Dixie Fire.
Cal Fire said the three-week-old fire grew to 322,502 acres overnight, driven by fierce winds, and leveled parts of Greenville, a Gold Rush-era community of about 1,000.
“Reports indicate that Greenville is 75 percent destroyed,” federal fire officials said in a morning incident briefing.
“We lost Greenville tonight,” an emotional Rep. Doug LaMalfa, whose congressional district includes Plumas County, said on Facebook late Wednesday. “My heart is aching.”
Eva Gorman, who runs a shop called Josefina Fine Knits, said in an interview: “The town is completely gone. The town has been devastated and leveled. There’s nothing left, almost nothing left of the town.” Her own business was destroyed, and many of the historical buildings appear to have been gutted.
Cal Fire spokesman Rick Carhart said “there were a number of homes and buildings destroyed,” but a full assessment of the damages wasn’t immediately available. Numerous photos and video posted on social media showed buildings on Greenville’s Main Street burning.
Carhart said he wasn’t aware of any reports of fatalities in Greenville. The Dixie Fire is the largest fire in California this year and the sixth-largest by acreage in state history. It grew by about 15% overnight and remained 35% contained for the third day.
Anxiety at Quincy evacuation site
Thursday morning in nearby Quincy, an ominous plume of gray smoke hovered over the northern horizon. Helicopters, their rotors spinning, prepared to take off at the Quincy airstrip and the fairgrounds were converted into a large camp for firefighters and their trucks and bulldozers.
At the Red Cross shelter at Springs of Hope Christian Fellowship, evacuee Jack Romero took his heeler mix, Rascal, out for a walk. He was one of a couple dozen people staying at the church, some in campers outside. Romero, 36, wasn’t in Greenville when his community caught fire Wednesday, but he watched on social media as images trickled in showing homes and businesses engulfed in flames.
He’s heartbroken and has no idea what to do next or where to go next. “I’d meant to put down roots and stay there for a while,” he said of Greenville, where he’d lived for nearly three years. “Now, I don’t even have a tent,” he said. “I have nothing.”
Jerry Thrall, a Greenville resident who was at the Quincy evacuation shelter, said he was still waiting to hear whether his home had burned.
“People there said it was just like a huge tornado went through the town,” said Thrall, who’s lived in Greenville for 27 years. “It burnt that town down in about 25 minutes.”
Kevin Goss, owner of Village Drug Co. in downtown Greenville and a Plumas County supervisor, said “the whole historic downtown area is destroyed.” That includes his drug store, which dated to 1860 and was the oldest building in town.
“It came through like a blowtorch,” he said. “Most of the town is flattened. I think we lost both gas stations.”
The fire also was bearing down on the small town of Chester, on the northwest side of Lake Almanor. Mike Wink, a Cal Fire battalion chief, said firefighters were able to extinguish a spot fire at the town’s mill Wednesday, but the community was still in danger.
“It’s not over in Chester,” he said. “It’s very hazardous, it’s red flag. ... It’s going to be a fire fight today again in Chester.”
Officials said the fire moved quickly into Greenville, which was leveled by fire in 1881 and has dozens of historic buildings. The area lies about 80 miles northeast of Paradise, where the Camp Fire killed 85 people in 2018 in the deadliest wildfire in California’s history.
Earlier in the day, it didn’t appear that Greenville was threatened. “Everything looked good,” said Jake Cagle, operations section chief at the multi-agency command. But then “it slopped over,” he said. “It got into Greenville.”
The Plumas County sheriff’s office posted an evacuation order on Facebook, saying: “You are in imminent danger and you MUST leave now!!”
Some Greenville residents stayed behind
But when the fire rushed into Greenville, many residents apparently didn’t heed or receive evacuation orders, hindering firefighters’ efforts.
Cagle said on Facebook late Wednesday that “there’s still a lot of people unfortunately in Greenville . ... A lot of people chose to stay in there.” He said the presence of residents forced firefighters to go into rescue mode, undermining their ability to control the fire itself.
Cal Fire said about 20,000 people have been evacuated in four counties, Plumas, Butte, Lassen and Tehama.
Carhart said the Lassen County community of Westwood, northeast of Lake Almanor, could be threatened, although the danger didn’t appear to be imminent. On Wednesday, fire inched closer to the lake and threatened the community of Almanor West, but firefighters were able to keep the community safe, he said.
Carhart said ever-changing winds were making conditions difficult for firefighters throughout the Dixie burn zone. Winds were expected to blow from the south, then shift from west to east in the afternoon, and then in a more from the north Thursday night. “It’s pretty dynamic,” he said.
While the cause of the Dixie Fire remains under investigation, PG&E Corp. has told state regulators that its equipment may have been responsible. The utility was driven into bankruptcy in early 2019 by a series of major fires, including the Camp Fire, but exited Chapter 11 last summer.
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