SIERRA-AT-TAHOE — South Lake Tahoe turned into a mass evacuation zone Monday as the raging Caldor Fire forced residents to flee and authorities urging everyone along the southern shore to get out of the area.
“It’s time to start going,” Cal Fire Chief Thom Porter said Monday.
Highway 50, one of the few routes out of the area, was gridlocked heading east toward Nevada, as vehicles jammed the road. Authorities closed state Highway 89 southbound at Emerald Bay and McKinney/Rubicon, forcing anyone on the southern part of Tahoe to exit the area through Carson City, Nev. Highway 50 remained indefinitely closed in both directions between Pollock Pines and Meyers.
Fire crews continued their efforts to slow the blaze, which ignited on Aug. 14 and by Monday was just 14% contained. The fire has destroyed 472 single-home residences and 11 commercial properties, while damaging 39 other structures. Another 20,414 structures are threatened, according to Cal Fire.
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The Caldor Fire went through about 20,000 acres in a 24-hour period, including about seven miles northeast of Highway 50 and an eight-mile run elsewhere, authorities said.
“This is a real tough one for us,” Porter said. “It’s burning in heavy timber and the deep canyon gorge of the Highway 50 corridor. It’s very difficult terrain and conditions against which to fight the fire.”
The east side of the fire is an especially difficult area, he said. The weather conditions and smoke combined to create a bit of an inversion last week, according to Porter, slowing it down and allowing crews to get their first containment. But with red-flag weather conditions returning this week — and winds expected to whip up to speeds of 15-20 mph and gusts of 30 mph — the fight to contain the flames at the edge of the Tahoe Basin has become more difficult.
“You take the lid off that inversion, and it’s like removing the top on a pot of steaming water. The steam is gonna go everywhere,” Porter said. The fire spread Sunday night, he added, was the biggest firefighters had seen since the fire began.
The red-flag warning, which went into effect at 2 p.m. Monday, will last through Tuesday night, according to the National Weather Service. The conditions are also expected to stoke the Dixie Fire, the second largest wildfire in state history, which began more than a month ago and has burned through more than 770,000 acres. As of Monday, that fire was 48% contained.
“We haven’t had fires burn from one side of the Sierra (Nevada) to the other,” Porter said. “We did with the Dixie Fire. And now with the Caldor. Two times in our history and both this month.”
Statewide, more than 15,000 personnel are fighting 15 active fires. The fires have burned more than 1,761,821 acres in California so far this year.
On the southern shore of Lake Tahoe, evacuation orders were issued for all of El Dorado County. In South Lake Tahoe, Barton Memorial Hospital evacuated all of its patients, transferring them to regional partner facilities in advance of mandatory evacuation orders Monday morning.
Areas under mandatory evacuation included:
Authorities urged those leaving the area from Fallen Leaf and Tahoma to go north on Highway 89 toward Truckee, and told all others to go east on Highway 50 toward Nevada, where Gov. Brian Sisolak declared a state of emergency shortly before 3 p.m. related to ongoing red-flag warning and expected impacts on Douglas and Washoe counties.
The air-quality index reading in South Lake Tahoe at noon Monday was 72, meaning it was moderately healthy, but rose into the low to mid 200s by 4 p.m. Readings through the weekend got into the very unhealthy category, with fine particulate matter between 200 and 300, and were expected to rise high again this week.
The fire has been pushing northeast toward the Lake Tahoe basin, and the Sierra-at-Tahoe resort — located between Strawberry and Echo Summit — was transformed this weekend into a key staging ground for Cal Fire and U.S. Forest Service crews working to stop the flames. Thousands of homes, vacation getaways and natural wilderness around the lakeshore were threatened.
Dozens of bulldozers, vegetation masticators, water tenders and trucks filled the central parking lot of the Sierra-at-Tahoe ski resort, waiting to ease their way up the slopes and broaden containment lines in the surrounding 2,000 acres of federal forestland.
When the sun rose Monday, the two-mile road into Sierra-at-Tahoe was surrounded on both sides by blackened forest land, and the hillsides up into the resort’s wilderness were charred.
Many of major buildings at Sierra-at-Tahoe were still standing, along with with ski lifts in their immediate vicinity.
To help with those who are evacuating, officials opened a new shelter at the Truckee Veterans Hall at 10214 High Street in Truckee. A Red Cross shelter also was open at the Douglas County Community Center at 1329 Waterloo Lane in Gardnerville, Nev.
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