Crews making progress on Sierra's Rim Fire
John Coté - San Francisco Chronicle
Updated 10:39 pm, Sunday, August 25, 2013
Fire crews from across the state, including San Francisco, were preparing to defend homes and other buildings in the Sierra Nevada foothill communities around Tuolumne City on Sunday as one of the largest fires in California history raged a few miles and one ridge line away.The Rim Fire, which has burned about 144,000 acres since it started just over a week ago west of Yosemite National Park, continued to grow Sunday, but it was the second day in a row that the fire advanced at a less-ferocious pace than it had last week, when it was doubling in size daily.
"We are making good progress," said Daniel Berlant, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. "It hasn't grown at the rate it did earlier."
Fire crews reported making significant progress along the western edge of the fire Sunday, and evacuation advisories had been lifted for the communities of Pine Mountain Lake and Buck Meadows.
Family cabin destroyed
But the blaze, which has destroyed 23 structures - including a popular city of Berkeley summer camp and at least some homes - was still only 7 percent contained Sunday, state fire officials said.
One of the burned-out homes was a cabin east of Groveland near Camp Mather that Jessica Sanderson's great grandfather built 70 years ago.
Sanderson, who grew up in Vacaville but now lives in Sarasota, Fla., thought the cabin, the site of innumerable family holiday gatherings, had been saved when she saw it untouched with firefighters in front of it on Friday's newscast from Fresno ABC affiliate KFSN TV.
"It kind of gave us hope," Sanderson said. "We were like, 'Oh, it's saved. They're there.' "
But Saturday, a family member found that the cabin had burned to the ground, leaving a crumpled metal roof, some metal railings and a cinder-block-and-brick barbecue pit.
"It's just heartbreaking," Sanderson said.
Cal Fire spokesman Johnny Miller confirmed that also destroyed in the wildfire was the Tuolumne Camp, a family camp about 5 miles west of the Yosemite National Park entrance that the city of Berkeley has run since 1922. The city had closed the camp Tuesday as the fire advanced.
Fire crews continued to battle the blaze on the ground and from the air Sunday, and strong winds from the south were expected to push the fire to the north and east - driving it farther into the northwest corner of Yosemite National Park and in the direction of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the main source of drinking water for 2.6 million people in the Bay Area.
So far, there have been no interruptions to the water supply, and testing has shown no change in drinking water quality since the fire began, said Tyrone Jue, a spokesman for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
The same could not be said for the city's hydropower generation. Two of three power production plants downriver from the reservoir had to shut down before the fire swept through, prompting the city to rely on reciprocal agreements with other utilities and to spend about $600,000 buying supplemental power to make up the shortfall, Jue said. One of the closed plants was still too dangerous to reach, while crews assessed the damage on the other Sunday afternoon and hoped to have repairs completed Monday. It will not be brought online until transmission lines in the fire zone can be inspected.
What the winds portend for Tuolumne City, Twain Harte and Ponderosa Hills to the north and northwest of the fire remains to be seen.
An evacuation advisory for those communities had been issued as crews trenched containment lines and hundreds of firefighters were prepared to defend homes and businesses.
Anticipating winds
"As the wind pushes from the south, there is that potential that it could make a turn toward these communities," Berlant said. "Our hope is that we can keep those safe. We have staged hundreds of firefighters to do structure defense and make a stand in those areas."
Jacob Smith, a computer systems engineer hunkered down in Ponderosa Hills, said Sunday the smoke was a lot thicker than in previous days.
"It is a little eerie and very quiet since over 80 percent of the subdivision has left," Smith said. "We're the only ones on this street."
Smith said he had packed up his family's recreational vehicle and was ready to leave with his wife and four children, ages 1 to 10, on short notice.
"There's actually just one more canyon between us and the fire," Smith said by phone. "It's obvious that they're trying to keep it from going down into the canyon."
Three bulldozers were cutting a firebreak nearby after working through the night, and planes and helicopters were routinely dropping retardant, he said.
The Rim Fire is threatening 4,200 structures of various types, state fire officials said. A major effort is under way to hold the fire east of the North Fork of the Tuolumne River.
State's 15th-largest fire
The cause of the fire, which began burning the afternoon of Aug. 17 and is now the 15th-largest in state history, is still under investigation.
The fire has been devouring brush and heavy stands of oak and pine in parched, steep terrain, much of it in a large river canyon, making it difficult to get access to and fight.
"It's a very dangerous area," Berlant said.
Source: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Crews-making-progress-on-Sierra-s-Rim-Fire-4760100.php
Check out http://groups.yahoo.com/group/californiadisasters/
Read my blog at http://eclecticarcania.blogspot.com/
My Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/derkimster
Linkedin profile: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kim-noyes/9/3a1/2b8
Follow me on Twitter @DisasterKim
__._,_.___
No comments:
Post a Comment