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 The so-called Valley Fire, now ranked as the most destructive
among scores of blazes that have ravaged the drought-stricken
Western United States this summer, came amid what California fire
officials described as "unheard of fire behavior" this season.
A separate fire raging since Wednesday in the western Sierras has
leveled more than 130 buildings and was threatening about 6,400
other structures, with thousands of residents under evacuation
orders there, too, the California Department of Forestry and Fire
Protection (Cal Fire) reported.
Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in both areas,
and mandatory evacuations were expanded as shifting winds sent
flames and ash from the Valley Fire toward a cluster of towns in the
hills north of Napa Valley wine country.
Reuters video footage from Middletown showed a smoking, devastated
landscape of blackened, burned-out vehicles and the charred
foundations of buildings that had been reduced to ash.
"While crews have not had a chance to do a full damage assessment
... we know hundreds of structures have been destroyed," Cal Fire
spokesman Daniel Berlant said in a Twitter post.
Property losses included "countless homes and other buildings," he
added in a subsequent video news briefing.
 The Valley Fire has consumed more than 50,000 acres (20,200
hectares) since igniting Saturday in rural Lake County, California,
about 50 miles (80 kms) west of Sacramento, the state capital, fire
officials said on Sunday.
Thousands of evacuees from Middletown, Cobb, Hidden Valley Lake and
the Harbin Hot Springs resort gathered in shelters, restaurants and
friends' houses in nearby Kelseyville and Calistoga to await word on
their homes, horses and dogs.
The mountain town of Cobb was hit first Saturday afternoon, and the
blaze reached Middletown before sunset a few hours later, Cal Fire
spokeswoman Amy Head told Reuters. The two communities, each with a
population of roughly 1,500, were among the areas that bore the
brunt of the flames.
A combination of drought and a heat wave last week had left
vegetation tinder dry and highly combustible, setting the stage for
a conflagration that thwarted the best efforts of firefighters to
contain it, Berlant said.
"Every time they made progress, the fire would burn right past
them," he said, adding that embers carried by the wind were sparking
new blazes and enlarging the fire zone.
During its first 12 hours, the blaze had devoured 40,000 acres of
forest, brush and grasslands at what Head called an "unprecedented
rate" of spread for a wildfire.
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Four firefighters were hospitalized with second-degree burns in the
early hours of the blaze and were listed in stable condition on
Sunday, but no other casualties were reported, Head said. Thick
smoke later kept water-dropping helicopters and airplane tankers
grounded, she said.
'FLAMES ALL AROUND'
Laura Streblow, 27, an evacuee who fled Hidden Valley Lake with her
boyfriend on Saturday night and was tracking developments on social
media and through friends, told Reuters she had heard that
"Middletown is basically gone."
"I saw flames all around ... The wind was insane. I have never been
so scared," she said.
Mark Donpineo, 54, said he and two friends were trapped by the fire
for four hours Saturday evening at a golf course in Hidden Valley
Lake, taking cover in a culvert until the flames had passed.
"We got some towels, wetted them down and basically saw the fire
coming. You could hear explosions of propane tanks, the ridge was
totally on fire, trees were blowing up," he said.
Meanwhile, Cal Fire reported that 81 homes and 51 outbuildings had
been lost in the four-day-old Butte Fire, which has charred more
than 65,000 acres in the mountains east of Sacramento but was 20
percent contained.
As of Sunday, firefighters were battling nearly three dozen large
blazes or clusters of fires in California and six other Western
states, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise,
Idaho.
(This version of the story removes specific number of evacuation
orders in paragraph three, following official correction from
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection)
(Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles;
Additional reporting by Curtis Skinner in Calistoga, Calif., Karen
Brooks in Austin, Texas, and Letitia Stein in Tampa, Florida.
Editing by Bill Trott, Andrea Ricci and Richard Pullin)
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