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 The so-called Valley Fire erupted on Saturday and spread quickly
to a cluster of small communities in the hills and valleys north of
Napa County's wine-producing region, forcing the evacuation of
thousands of residents.
An elderly, disabled woman who was unable to flee her home died in
the fire as flames consumed the building on Saturday evening, Lake
County Sheriff's spokesman Lieutenant Steve Brooks said.
Evacuated residents recounted chaotic ordeals of having to flee
their homes through gauntlets of flame, and some 9,000 structures
remained threatened as darkness fell on Monday evening, according to
the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal
Fire).
"That whole place was ablaze. It was like Armageddon," said Steve
Johnson, a 37-year-old construction worker from Southern California
who was visiting his mother in the fire-ravaged community of Hidden
Valley Lake. "We were literally driving through the flames."
Johnson and his mother safely escaped and spent Sunday night at a
high school gymnasium converted into an evacuation center.
By Monday evening, the blaze had blackened 62,000 acres (24,690
hectares) of tinder-dry forests, brush and grasslands, and was only
about 10 percent contained, according to Cal Fire.
About 40,000 acres (16,190 hectares) of the landscape were consumed
in the first 12 hours of the fire at the peak of its intensity on
Saturday and early Sunday, stoked by high winds.
Fire officials described the rapid initial rate of spread as nearly
unprecedented, a consequence of vegetation desiccated by four years
of drought and weeks of extreme summer heat.
 Four firefighters were hospitalized with second-degree burns in the
early hours of the blaze on Saturday.
By Monday night more than 1,400 firefighters were battling the
flames, one of 12 major wildfires across the state during an intense
fire season. SCENES OF DEVASTATION
The communities of Cobb, Middletown, Hidden Valley Lake and the
Harbin Hot Springs resort - located about 50 miles (80 km) west of
Sacramento, the state capital - were reported to be hardest hit by
the fire.
Reuters video footage from Middletown, a village of about 1,500
residents, showed a smoking, devastated scene of burned-out
vehicles, twisted, blackened debris and charred foundations of
buildings that had been reduced to ash. Roughly half of the town was
leveled.
The carcass of a horse was seen lying on the shoulder of the road
between Cobb and Middletown, a stretch of highway where miles of
houses were laid to waste on both sides.
"We were trying to get out. We were trying to hook up our trailer
and all of a sudden, two houses up I see this big wall of pink and
red and gray," said Carol Ulrich of Middletown. "So we just dropped
everything and left. I didn't even get my purse, nothing. We just
drove away and left our trailer and everything."
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Janet Mondragon of Middletown, appeared close to tears as she
watched videotaped footage of her home in flames.
"We have nothing, absolutely nothing," she said. "What can I tell
you? We are staying in a hotel in Santa Rosa, but we're going to
have to start life over. There is nothing, absolutely nothing."
Cal Fire on Monday reported that some 1,000 structures had been
lost, at least 400 of them homes. Mark Ghilarducci, Director of the
state's Office of Emergency Services, told reporters on Monday some
13,000 people had been displaced.
Governor Jerry Brown, who also spoke at the news conference, said
climate change would continue to worsen fire conditions.
That tally ranks as the greatest loss of property from a single
blaze in California this season, or among the scores of wildfires
that have ravaged the drought-stricken western United States so far
this summer, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in
Boise.
The property toll is expected to rise as damage-assessment teams
reach areas of the fire zone that have yet to be surveyed, but no
additional communities were under immediate threat on Monday, Smith
said.
The Valley Fire also damaged the cooling towers at five of the 14
steam-generating plants operated by Texas-based Calpine Corp at a
sprawling geothermal field straddling the Sonoma-Lake county border,
company spokesman Brett Kerr said.
A separate blaze raging since Wednesday in the western Sierras has
destroyed 135 homes and 79 outbuildings and was threatening about
6,400 structures, with some 10,000 people displaced there too,
officials said.
In Oregon, meanwhile, Governor Kate Brown invoked the state’s
so-called Emergency Conflagration Act on Monday, mobilizing
additional resources as a fast-growing wildfire threatened 275 homes
in a rural area of the state.
(Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman and Dan Whitcomb
in Los Angeles; Editing by Jonathan Oatis, Mary Milliken and Ken
Wills)
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