An ‘extreme’ wildfire sweeping through the hills of California has left dozens of people homeless and reduced one of state’s most historic towns to ashes.
The 38,000-acre Borel fire is thought to have started at 1pm on Wednesday when a car careened over the side of a canyon on Highway 178 in Kern County, killing the driver and bursting into flames.
By Friday night it had reached the outskirts of Havilah before tearing through the nineteenth century prospecting town that was once home to saloons, dance halls, hotels, and shops.
A charred plaque is all that remains of the courthouse which dated back to 1866 and was designated California’s 100th landmark until the fire extinguished its history in the early hours of Saturday.
‘We lost everything, it’s all gone,’ resident Sean Rains told LATimes.com.
A charred plaque is all that remains of the courthouse which dated back to 1866
The court house, which doubled as the town’s museum was designated California’s 100th landmark until the fire extinguished its history in the early hours of Saturday
‘This whole town burned down. Multiple people, friends that I know, everybody lost everything.’
Firefighters are battling a host of massive blazes across the state, including one which is tearing through the area around Butte County at a rate of 5,000 acres an hour.
The Park fire is just 12 percent contained and had already burned more than 360,000 acres by Sunday, making it the seventh-largest ever recorded in the state’s history.
The Trout fire in Tulare County has burned 23,369 acres and the nearby Long fire has consumed 9,204 acres since it was first reported on July 16.
But the Borel fire which destroyed Havilah is completely out of control and now threatening the nearby communities of Bodfish and Lake Isabella.
‘We’ve been under red flag warning conditions, and the fire continues to burn in a very, very intense and erratic way,’ said Captain Andrew Freeborn of the Kern County Fire Department.
‘The flames can be seen from miles away. If you’re looking for what extreme fire behavior would be defined as, we’re seeing it on this fire.’
Just a few buildings remain standing in the historic mining town, including the Havilah School House which was built in 1867.
Resident Brett Keith found nothing but his old shotgun when he returned to the smoking ruins of his home in Havilah on Sunday morning
More than 1,200 firefighters are battling a blaze their boss has described as ‘very, very intense’
The structure appeared doomed when a torrent of embers found their way underneath it and incinerated the wooden deck.
But fire crews managed to cut the porch away from the building before it took hold.
The town had escaped the most of the wildfires that have menaced the state for more than 30 years, leaving an abundance of unburned brush to fuel the overdue blaze.
‘And when you align the low humidity, high winds, triple-digit weather we’ve been dealing with for the last 10 to 12 days, it all lined up for a perfect storm in there,’ Kern County Fire Department Chief Deputy Dionisio Mitchell Mitchell told a news conference on Saturday.
The town was home to 3,000 people at its peak and served as the seat of government for Kern County between 1866 and 1872.
Before it was destroyed, the museum recorded the town was the site of the county’s last stage coach robbery in 1896 when the Kernville stage to Caliente was held-up by a lone gunman on horseback who got away with 1,700 coins and pieces of gold bullion from the Wells Fargo strong box.
Neither he nor the loot was ever found.
Dan Guse, Operations Section Chief with the South Central Sierra Interagency Incident Management Team 14 said hundreds of people had fled Havilah as the fire took hold.
‘Most of our folks spent most of the night trying to keep people safe instead of being able to engage in line and to be able to put firefighting into effect,’ he added.
‘For the most part, it was about saving people and getting them out of harm’s way.’
The town’s schoolhouse, dating back to 1867, appeared doomed when embers took hold before firefighters saved it at the last moment by cutting away the blazing porch
‘We lost everything, it’s all gone,’ resident Sean Rains told LATimes.com
Resident Brett Keith was among those who returned on Sunday to find their homes destroyed.
All he could find in the ruins was a shotgun he was given as a seven-year-old and a large bull suffering from burns in his front yard.
‘I’ll have to call my neighbor to come and get his bull,’ he told the Times.
More than 1,200 firefighters are battling the blaze and incident commander Jim Snow said they were hampered by the area’s ‘steep, unforgiving country’.
‘The weatherman says it’s 100 degrees out, but with the heat from the fire, the heat from the slope reflecting off it, and the heat from the general air temperature, you’re looking at upwards of 120, 130 degrees at any given time for the firefighters standing out there,’ he added.
