By Fred Greaves
COLFAX, California (Reuters) – A wildfire that began on Wednesday afternoon rapidly spread in woods surrounding a populated area northeast of Sacramento in California, burning homes, forcing evacuations and generating a towering plume of smoke visible from at least 70 miles (110 km) away.
The so-called River Fire scorched 1,000 acres (400 hectares) within two hours of starting and none of it was contained, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) said.
At least four homes were destroyed in Colfax, a town of 2,000 people about 50 miles (80 km) northeast of Sacramento, according to a Reuters witness.
The Placer County Sheriff’s Office issued an evacuation order for Colfax and other nearby towns.
“Gather your essentials and leave the area safely,” the office said in a Facebook posting.
One evacuation center had been established and a secondary site had yet to be determined, the post said.
In neighboring Nevada County, six zones were under evacuation orders and another four were under evacuation warnings.
Carrie Levine, a fire ecologist from nearby Grass Valley, said her family had evacuated even without an official warning because the fire was moving so fast.
“They’re really close, so we just decided to head out,” said Levine, who studies fire fuels and develops models for a private company. “There’s a big column of smoke. It’s pretty dark, kind of like a purple, gray, eerie smoke. It’s in a pretty steep river canyon, and they really like to just blow up river canyons with the wind.”
Another expert urged people to evacuate because the fire was likely to keep spreading rapidly.
“In an analysis we did a couple years ago for an insurer, the Colfax/Auburn/Grass Valley area was one of the highest risk areas in the state for a catastrophic loss wildfire,” Crystal Kolden, a pyrogeographer at the University of California Merced, said on Twitter. “Don’t wait to evacuate.”
The River Fire was less than 100 miles south of the raging Dixie Fire, which according to Cal Fire has consumed 274,000 acres and was only 35% contained three weeks after it started. That fire has destroyed at least 67 structures and threatened thousands of others, the Sacramento Bee reported.
More than a dozen wildfires were burning around the state, which typically experiences peak fire season later in the year. California was on pace to suffer even more burnt acreage this year than last year, which was the worst fire season on record.
(Reporting by Fred Greaves in Colfax, California, and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California)
