Hundreds of homes lost since 1992
- By Jim Schultz - Redding Record Searchlight
- Posted July 6, 2012 at 11:41 p.m.
Some of California's worst fires have been recorded here, such as the August 1992 Fountain Fire, which destroyed 636 buildings and scorched 63,960 acres.
Arson was determined as that fire's cause, but its culprit was never found.
But that fire was far from being the only one.
The Canyon Fire in Happy Valley wiped out 64 homes and scorched 2,000 acres in late September 1999, while only a few weeks later, in mid-October, furious winds whipped up a new inferno — the Jones Fire.
That fire destroyed 174 homes and burned a 26,000-acre swath from Lake Shasta almost to Anderson.
Karen Savage, a Trinity County firefighter, died in an accident with a fire engine while fighting the Jones Fire.
In August of that same year, a dry lightning storm sparked hundreds of blazes from Burney to Big Bear.
One cluster of fires — the High Complex — burned more than 40,000 acres near Lake Shasta. The granddaddy of them all, the Big Bear Complex west of Weaverville, scarred more than 100,000 acres and wasn't extinguished until October.
When all was said and done, at least 250 homes were destroyed throughout Shasta County in 1999 — more than the entire state loses in an average year to fire — and the damage total topped $50 million.
It was a bad year, too, for Trinity County, where the Lowden Fire exploded in early July 1999.
That fire, which was a U.S. Bureau of Land Management prescribed burn that escaped control, destroyed 23 homes near Lewiston in Trinity County and blackened more than 2,000 acres.
The 2004 Bear Fire, sparked by a lawn mower, destroyed almost 11,000 acres and destroyed at least 86 dwellings.
That fire was followed only days later by the French Fire in the French Gulch area. That blaze ravaged more than 13,000 acres, destroyed more than 25 homes and threatened the entire historic town.
And those who were here will likely never forget the summer of 2008, which will always be remembered in the north state as a time of unrelenting blazes, smoke-choked skies and seesaw battles against hundreds of forest fires that eventually were beaten back by weary firefighters. A widespread June lightning storm that strafed Northern California with an estimated 7,000 dry lightning strikes created an inferno that forced hundreds of residents to evacuate their homes in the ensuing weeks.
The lightning ignited hundreds of wildfires in Siskiyou, Trinity and Shasta counties that burned through the summer, charring close to a million acres.
In addition, two firefighters were killed in separate incidents fighting fires in Trinity County in July, while nine men, including seven contract firefighters, perished the following month when their helicopter crashed and burned on a remote and rugged ridgetop in Trinity County.
In 2009, a Los Molinos woman who carelessly discarded a cigarette sparked the 1,200-acre Coffin Fire that threatened Lewiston and forced evacuations. Although the fire damaged some homes, none was destroyed.
Source: http://www.redding.com/news/2012/jul/06/massive-fires-nothing-new-in-the-north-state/
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