On Verge of Disaster, a Reprieve

WEAVERVILLE, Calif. —  Singed at its fringes but whole in spirit, this tiny town on the edge of the Trinity Alps crept back from the brink of disaster Wednesday.

Exhausted residents told of a night of terror as a fire of amazing speed forced them to abandon their homes and flee with only handfuls of possessions.

Some fought to save their homes until searing heat and choking smoke became unbearable.

“We stayed on the back deck and sprayed as much [water] as we could, but it didn’t help,” said Mike Price, a lumberyard manager, looking at the smoking ruins of his three-bedroom home and the charred remnants of a 1946 Chevrolet pickup and a 1951 Mercury sedan, once immaculately restored.

Price’s wife, Phyllis, could only stare at the wreckage, wiping away tears, unable to find words to express her shock. Minutes later the couple drove away from what had once been their dream home adjacent to the Trinity National Forest.

Wayne Hurst, a writer and Weaverville resident for 20 years, was luckier. His home was spared. “I was watering houses and the smoke was so heavy, you couldn’t breathe,” Hurst said. “It was apocalyptic.”

High winds had pushed the fire toward the western portion of this picturesque town of 3,500 residents about 200 miles north of San Francisco.

By Wednesday evening, the fire had consumed 1,680 acres in the surrounding mountains and was 65% controlled. Nine homes and three trailers were destroyed.

On Tuesday night, firefighters had gone door to door ordering residents--some independent-minded souls who moved to this mountain hamlet in search of privacy--to evacuate. About half the residents did so. A hospital and jail were also evacuated.

By midday the danger had passed, although thick, acrid smoke blanketed the region, and people were allowed to return home.

“Right now there’s so much smoke in the air we can’t even see the mountains,” Richard Huddleston, manager of the Forty-Niner Gold Country Inn, said Wednesday.

Despite the destruction all around, the historic center of this 19th century Gold Rush community, which features an old courthouse and the Weaverville Joss House, the oldest continuously used Chinese temple in California, was spared.

The fire may have been started by sparks from a passing vehicle, possibly a lumber truck, on Oregon Mountain Pass, officials said.

The flames raced up a grassy hillside off California 299, and within minutes were skipping over treetops, igniting massive pines like they were made of paraffin, and licking at the doorsteps of homes.

Caught by surprise on a hot and breezy summer afternoon, the town retreated, first to the Trinity County Sheriff’s Department office, then to the fire station, and finally to the safety of motels.

After a terrifying night in which the town center and nearby subdivisions looked doomed, the winds subsided, the air dampened and flames retreated, leaving behind smoldering pits where tree stumps once were. More than 900 firefighters had scraped a protective barrier around the town.

On Wednesday, heat waves still shimmered around the burned-out homes, where the only recognizable objects were melted hulks of large appliances.

“It was a lot of hard work and luck,” said Mike Mikkola, a sawmill employee whose home was damaged but not destroyed. “I had water on the back porch and the side. The porch was burning, then the wood pile, then the corner of the garage.”

Mikkola took a chain saw to a smoldering cedar, which began burning from the inside out after embers blew into a knothole. A thick cross-section of the trunk burst into flame as a breeze fanned its smoldering core, like a miniature blast furnace.

By mid-afternoon, firefighters had lifted evacuation orders and opened most roadblocks. Streets that had been filled with nervous residents and parking lots that had been crammed with vehicles in which people slept overnight began to empty.

The Trinity Theater, which advertised a production of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame,” also posted a “Go Firefighters” message on its marquee.

“I saw all this smoke coming up and it wasn’t far from the apartment,” said Corrina Smith, 39, a day-care operator, as she recalled fleeing with her three children and three nieces and nephews. “Everybody was packing. I took some pictures, kids’ clothes, some essentials.”

While relatively small in acreage, the fire startled even veteran firefighters with its speed and heat.

“Unless we’d had tankers and trucks all around it, we were going to lose it,” said Fred Fortes, a 10-year investigator with the California Department of Forestry. “This one was going to go and that’s all there was to it.”

Doug Hodges, owner of the Victorian Inn, had gone 36 hours without sleep by late Wednesday. Several hundred people slept inside the banquet hall, in the parking lots and inside.

At 3 a.m., Hodges got a call saying the hundreds of firefighters holding the line against the blaze were hungry.

Hodges, his staff and volunteers began cooking 1,296 eggs, 84 pounds of bacon and 25 pounds each of sausage and ham. No one counted the gallons of coffee.

“That’s the way this community works,” said Hodges, his voice hoarse from the smoke. “We’re a small town and at a time like this, we come together as a family.”

The Weaverville drama was played out on a hot, sultry day when 26 large fires were burning on more than 200,000 acres across the West, including the 8,000-acre Star Fire along the Middle Fork of the American River in the Eldorado and Tahoe national forests about 25 miles west of Lake Tahoe.

In Ukiah, Frank Brady, 50, was arraigned on two counts of murder for allegedly igniting the blaze that led to the deaths of two firefighting pilots in a collision Monday morning.

Brady is accused of operating a methamphetamine laboratory that exploded and set off the 300-acre blaze in Mendocino County. Dist. Atty. Norm Vroman said investigators are probing whether Brady is part of a drug ring involving the Hells Angels motorcycle gang.

Vroman said Brady was vice president of the Mendocino County chapter of the Hells Angels.