After Fire, Residents Return to Tally Losses

REDDING — Lee Hoover totaled it up Monday. The weekend of flames and smoke that roared through the rolling hills east of here had reduced his double-wide mobile home to a corpse of twisted metal.

Monday was reckoning day.

“We weren’t able to get anything out--not even a pencil,” said the retired auto mechanic. He pointed to what’s left of his brand new refrigerator, grimaced at the charred skeleton of an exercise bike. Nowhere to be seen were his rifles and shotguns, a lifetime of photos of children, the TV, the VCR, all the clothes.

Even with insurance, Hoover summed up, “I figure I’m out $90,000 easy. That’s cash money, to get us back to the basics.”

As the smoke cleared Monday, the grim assessment began of the devastation wrought by the Jones Valley fire, the most ferocious fire in California this year. The blaze, driven by howling winds, swept a checkerboard path down a 17-mile swath of Shasta County. It leaped from farmhouse to barn to travel trailer, sparing some, incinerating others.

In all, the fire burned 26,000 acres, causing more than $6 million in damage, authorities said. One firefighter was killed when she was hit by a firetruck and one person was injured. About 100 homes were lost.

A common sight now in outback spots like Bella Vista, which absorbed the brunt of the punishment, is a solitary chimney and outline of ash where a family home used to be.

The Redding-area blaze was just one of several that has seared bone-dry stretches of Northern California. In other parts of the state, firefighters continued to battle a number of wildfires, including some that have burned since August.

All told, wildfires have scorched about 700,000 acres in California this year, approaching the 1987 record of 840,000 acres. Most of the blazes have been in remote areas, many of them on federal land, and even with the Jones Valley fire, the loss of buildings has been minor compared to 1991. That was the year of the big Oakland fire, when 3,000 structures were destroyed.

Northwest of Redding, about 119,000 acres have burned since August in the Big Bar fire in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Over the weekend, the blaze jumped fire lines in three places, moving within eight miles of the tiny town of Hoopa on the Hoopa Indian Reservation. It is also threatening the hamlet of Denny, whose 50 to 100 residents can’t evacuate because the road out has become too hazardous.

Federal fire information officer Allyn Herrington said there are enough fire crews and equipment to protect the community, and a large plowed field has been designated a safe area for locals to gather in.

Firefighters have been hampered by steep, remote terrain and dry winds. Hundreds of additional firefighters are being brought in.

In the sparsely populated Rumsey Canyon area in Yolo and Lake counties, 40,000 acres burned over the weekend. But Monday the winds were settling and fire crews were optimistic they could get a handle on the blaze.

In Yuba County near Dobbins, 9,000 acres went up in flames over the weekend. The fire apparently started when a tree hit a power line. And more than 85,000 acres of the Los Padres National Forest in Big Sur have been blackened in a weeks-old blaze that refuses to die.

The Jones Valley fire, brought under control by 3,000 firefighters, continued to flare in a secluded forest ridge just south of Shasta Lake. But residents of areas hammered by the blaze were back in their homes Sunday evening. If they had homes to return to.

For those who suffered losses, Monday was insurance day. Darrell Smith stood in his yard east of the Redding Municipal Airport, portable phone in hand, eyeing what was left of his barn, waiting for the insurance man to arrive.

“There’s nothing salvageable,” Smith said, pointing out the hulk of a fried rototiller, the blackened figure of his old bench grinder.

His was one of the last properties hit by the blaze, which was finally stopped just a mile north of the Sacramento River. Smith evacuated at nightfall Saturday, grabbing one of his cats and a few valuables, driving out through a canopy of flames in oaks lining Loftus Lane.

He returned expecting to see everything gone. But his house survived, saved by a ring of green lawn, some luck and the work of several gutsy fire crews.

The house next door was a total loss. As the fire approached, Smith said, the residents had fled and forgotten to turn on the lights. In the darkness and pea-soup smoke, firefighters probably never saw it, Smith said.

“They could have saved it if they had known it was there.”

A quarter of a mile away, where firefighters finally conquered the blaze on a strip of asphalt called Fig Tree Lane, Dave Adams and Kellie Gammel witnessed the fickle nature of the fire. After wetting down the roof of their house, they fled.

Adams and Gammel returned Sunday to find their home still standing. The fire had consumed a pile of wood they were using to remodel the place, took out a bunch of fence posts and scorched several cars. But two homes right next to them were completely burned out.

“We were lucky,” Gammel said. “We lost a few things, but it can all be replaced.”

Hoover saw luck turn on him. The fire raced by his 3-acre place Saturday, coming no closer than a mile away. But then the winds shifted and a wall of flame reversed direction, heading straight back at him.

The blaze virtually melted the mobile home he shared with girlfriend Silvia Byers. It blasted the tractor, melted the trash cans. The three-car garage, however, was somehow spared.

On Monday, Hoover was already making plans to rebuild. His insurance will probably cover less than half the loss.

“I came up here to retire, and I’m going to stick with it,” Hoover said. “I’m glad we came out of this all right. We could have been caught by it. But we’re standing here. We’re OK.”