GREENVILLE, Calif. — Driven by fierce winds and bone-dry conditions, the Dixie fire exploded to 432,813 acres in Northern California, having grown more than 100,000 acres in the last 24 hours. It is now the third-largest wildfire in state history, officials said.
The fire, which started on July 13 in Feather River Canyon north of Sacramento, has destroyed at least 134 structures, threatens 13,871 structures, and has sent thousands of area residents fleeing from their homes, officials said. The massive blaze is now burning in four counties — Butte, Lassen, Plumas and Tehama — and remains 35% contained.
Some of the worst damage was in Greenville, a small town that was overrun by the fire on Wednesday. The Gold Rush-era town is home to about 1,000 residents.
Roughly three-fourths of the remote town’s structures went up in flames, fires spokeswoman Serena Baker said the morning after the blaze swept through the remote town.
Plumas County Sheriff Todd Johns struck a somber tone at a briefing Thursday night, describing himself as a lifelong resident of Greenville. “My heart is crushed by what has occurred there, and to the folks that have lost residences and businesses — I’ve met some of them already — their life is now forever changed,” he said.
“And all I can tell you is, I’m sorry.”
More than 5,000 personnel are attacking the blaze, and Johns said they were making a valiant effort and are “being met with complete and utter devastation at every turn.”
Greenville was a smoking ruin by Thursday morning, its sign melted so that the lettering crackled like glaze. Entire blocks were razed. Flames still flickered where they could find perches on something left to burn. Hulls of cars lined the street, reduced to charred tanks and melted wheels.
The U.S. Postal Service building was standing, but inside, the banks of P.O. boxes lay collapsed on the ground, their doors burned off. The gas station was smoldering, its metal roof twisted and swollen, its pumps burned-out shells.
At Main and Crescent streets, the historic Bransford & McIntyre Store was reduced to its walls and five steel doors that were meant to protect it from just such a fate. A plaque on the front of the building said the store had been built on this site in the mid-1870s but burned in an 1881 fire. It was immediately replaced with a brick building that, according to a plaque, was “built like a fortress,” complete with “steel shuttered doors and windows.”
None of it was enough to save the store from the Dixie fire.
“The whole historic downtown area is gone,” said Kevin Goss, a Plumas County supervisor who owned a pharmacy that was destroyed. It was the oldest building in town and dated back to 1860, he said.
Goss had gone into town Wednesday and saw the fire jump off the hillside, raining sparks and embers around Greenville.
“That’s when the fire came to town,” he said. “It came through there like a blowtorch.”
Fire officials said they battled the blaze in Greenville for hours, and many people — although not all — fled as the flames approached.
But there was much that could not be saved.
Curtis Machlan alternated between past and present tense as he spoke about Greenville.
The 58-year-old in 2007 moved to the Gold Rush-era town, where the population sign read more than 2,000 people but where the community numbers just over 1,000.
It’s the town where he met his wife, Kimberly, who had moved to the area in the late 1990s from San Jose.
“We’d go to the local grocery store and sometimes it would take over an hour to get out, just to run in and get a gallon of milk or something, because we knew everybody,” Machlan said.
The library where Machlan’s wife once worked burned down. The building that housed the auto parts store where Machlan once worked was gone, too.
On Thursday, he heard from a friend who stayed and tried to fight the fire in a pasture behind the Machlan home. He said the house had been reduced to ash. Neighbors’ homes were also destroyed.
The friend described the scene as a “moonscape.”
“It’s tragic for so many people,” Machlan said, adding that the catastrophe came as no surprise because conditions in the Sierra Nevada have been the driest he’s ever seen.
“Even just with that sense that I knew it was coming, it’s like losing a loved one,” he said. “Like a death of a loved one.”
“It’s the climate change,” Machlan said. “Everybody who didn’t believe it in Greenville is now a climate refugee.”
Crews were still assessing the damage, but it’s believed that three-quarters of the town’s buildings were consumed, fire spokeswoman Serena Baker said Thursday morning. At least 67 structures were destroyed, with more than 12,000 under threat, according to authorities.
PG&E has said that its equipment may have sparked the fire July 13 but that a worker didn’t get to the site and discover the flames until 9½ hours later.
On Monday, the utility company disclosed that its equipment may also have ignited the Fly fire, which started July 22 off Highway 70 and grew to 4,300 acres before it merged with the Dixie fire two days later.
The utility said it was taking additional safety measures, including attempting to respond to any fault or outage in a high-fire-risk area within 60 minutes or less, in light of this season’s severe burning conditions.
