California Wildfire destroys 500 structures, almost community levels

REDDING, Calif. – In the small community of Keswick, northern California, there are only a handful of houses

The air is smelling of smoke and fumes. chemical products. The debris of people's lives still flowed a day after the so-called Carr Fire pbaded through Shasta County as a freight train.

The flames so devoured the houses that it's hard to say how much they were above the ash pile.

Somewhere, there was Shyla's house and Jason Campbell.

Jason Campbell, a firefighter, was at six o'clock fighting a forest fire near the Yosemite Valley when Carr's fire settled at his home.

Shyla Campbell, 32, said it was close to 2 am Thursday when she received an official alert to evacuate.

"It's a huge flame, it goes up, and everybody's out and we look, then it goes down, and everybody says, 'Oh, that's coming out,'" she said. say, "No, it's coming down the mountain and it's going to go up the next ridge." "

She was right

The family spent the night in a hotel when Jason Campbell came back from the fire that he was fighting on Friday, he discovered that his own house had caught fire, with a recreational vehicle and a boat.

The Campbell's five-year-old home is part of at least 500 structures that public servants These fires also destroyed the fire, which also swept Shasta, the historic city of the gold rush, and reached the homes of Redding, a town of 92,000 inhabitants located about 100 miles south of the border from Oregon, Shasta Lake City. "I just have to figure out where we are going to stay, we are just trying to stay at the l & # 3 9, fire escape. "

There are therefore about 37,000 people who remain under evacuation orders on Friday. Nearly 5,000 homes in the region were threatened by the 75 square kilometer fire, which is limited to 5%.

Thousands of people scrambled to escape before the walls of the flames descended from the forests.

Residents who hastily collected their belongings described a chaotic and cluttered escape as the embers exploded a mile ahead of the flames and fire spread across the vast Sacramento River and set fire to the Redding Subdivisions

. Redding police chief Roger Moore was among those who lost their homes, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Greg and Terri Hill evacuated their 18-year-old Redding home on Thursday night with a little more than their drugs, photo albums, clothes and guns. Assuming that they would be back in a few days.

But when they came back on Friday, there was almost nothing left of them except fine particles of ashes.

The remains were bustling so hard they could not. I'm too close to see if anything has survived.

"It's quite moving," Terri Hill said. "I know it's just stuff, a lot of memories, but we'll make new memories and new things, everyone is safe."

The Hills fled before they were told, knowing that the danger was rising.

Liz Williams took two children in her car and was found stranded in traffic with neighbors trying to retreat from Redding Estates Lake.

She finally jumped "I've never experienced something so terrifying of my life," she said. "I did not know if the fire would just jump behind a bush and grab me and suck me off."

The flames moved so fast that firefighters working in conditions of temperature and bone dryness had to "

The fire, which created at least two inflamed tornadoes that toppled trees, shook the equipment of fighting the fire and breaking the windows of the trucks, "fell back all the way," says Scott. McLean, a spokesman for Cal Fire, the state agency responsible for fighting forest fires.

Two firefighters were killed in the fire, Redding fire inspector Jeremy Stoke and a bulldozer operator whose name was not immediately released. He was the second bulldozer operator killed in a California fire in less than two weeks.

Firefighters warned that the fire would likely burn more deeply in urban areas before there was any hope of containing it.

Elsewhere in the state, major fires continued to burn outside Yosemite National Park and in the San Jacinto Mountains, east of Los Angeles, near Palm Springs.