How South Lake Tahoe was saved from the Caldor fire

The days that followed were tense as the fire made its way into the Lake Tahoe basin. On Sunday, August 29, the southeast winds blazed and the Caldor Fire burned more than 20,000 acres in 24 hours. As of Monday, 3,684 firefighters were working on all fronts, as flames rose and flew over Echo Summit, burning down cabins built and maintained by generations of families, many from the Bay Area. For the thousands of homes nestled below, in the woods of Christmas Valley and Meyers, the future looked bleak.

But then something incredible happened. On Monday evening, the blaze spread through the valley, to the edge of the Christmas Valley neighborhood, where it fired embers over Highway 89, sparking a point fire in the forest just above the houses across the road and continued to burn. is.

Both sides of the valley were engulfed in flames. But on Friday, many homes in Christmas Valley, Meyers and South Tahoe are still standing.

As of Friday morning, daily reports showed just 2,200 acres had burned in the previous 24 hours – a fraction of the area compared to Sunday night. The fire is 29% contained. A fire official mentioned that luck played a big role in preventing a major crisis this week. Others said the winds had not caused the devastation many feared.

Parker Wilbourn, spokesperson for Cal Fire, said there were three big factors to this week’s success.

First, progress on the Caldor fire could not have happened without the large number of firefighters, engines, helicopters, bulldozers and other resources. During the week, nearly a thousand more firefighters arrived; at the top, there were 4,451 firefighter boots on the ground.

“Oh, it made an incredible difference,” Wilbourn said. “We have 523 fire trucks on this incident. We have 84 water supply vessels, 27 helicopters, 62 crews and 95 bulldozers. We therefore have enormous resources to fight this fire. “

Second, Wilbourn said the massive deployment of resources in the Lake Tahoe Basin over the past 5-10 years to prevent forest fires and promote forest health – steps that have been taken to prevent disaster just like the one threatened by the Caldor fire – directly helped the firefighters. fight the flames in Lake Tahoe this week.

Finally, Wilbourn praised the owners of Lake Tahoe for heeding advice authorities have been shouting for years: a defensible space.

“They’re taking ownership of their living space and it’s phenomenal,” Wilbourn said. “We would like to thank the owners, as well as the forest service, for their efforts.

Cal Fire Incident Commander Rocky Opliger described in a community briefing Thursday night what he saw happen when the Caldor Fire approached Apache Avenue, a street on the edge of Meyers. The flames extended 150 feet high as the blaze moved towards the homes of Meyers, Opliger said. But once the blaze reached parts of the forest that had been recently thinned or scorched, the flames subsided to just 15 feet high, giving firefighters and rescue crews a window to act, stop the fire from advancing in the neighborhood and prevent houses from burning.

“This is the kind of work that we see all over the South Lake area,” Opliger said. He noted that all work on the Caldor fire has been a collaboration of federal, state and local agencies, supported by law enforcement and community leaders. “These are the efforts of all the agencies working together. “

Following the Angora Fire, which burned 280 structures in southern Tahoe in 2007, nearly two dozen agencies across the basin formed a partnership called the Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team with the explicit mission of reduce fuels in the forest-urban interface (a term used by experts to refer to the forests that border neighborhoods) and prepare communities for the day when a forest fire occurs.

South Lake Tahoe saw this day this week.

Since 2008, the Tahoe Fire and Fuels team has treated some 65,000 acres in the wild-urban interface of the Lake Tahoe Basin, said Forest Schafer, director of the California Tahoe Conservancy’s natural resources division. These acres of treatment include forest thinning – by hand and machine – and prescribed burning.

Between 2010 and 2020, agencies in the Lake Tahoe Basin spent $ 133 million on forest health projects that primarily focus on reducing fuels in the forest and protecting neighborhoods from wildfires.

This week, firefighters have arrived in Lake Tahoe from at least eight different states, Wilbourn said, along with crews from across California. He noted that he was sitting next to a Los Angeles firefighter who joined the fight to help protect Lake Tahoe.

“The last thing anyone wants is to see Lake Tahoe burn,” Wilbourn said. “So we threw away everything we had.”

Cal Fire officials said on Friday morning they were “cautiously optimistic” about the Caldor fire, but the job is not yet finished. Huge bulldozer lines – built by machines with blades as wide as 10 feet, according to Wilbourn – are still being built every day to defend South Tahoe from the flames. And Thursday, air attacks dropped 500,000 gallons of retarder and water on the flames.

But the weather took a turn towards favorable conditions, granting the firefighters mild winds, lower temperatures and more nighttime humidity to help them move forward in taming the Caldor blaze.

Cal Fire officials know that residents of South Tahoe can’t wait to get home. Evacuation orders are still in effect.

“We will do everything we can to get people home,” Wilbourn said. “We understand that people are frustrated – they just want a sense of normalcy. They want to go home. And we totally sympathize with that. But we want to do it safely.