California crews struggle to contain raging Rocky fire

Firefighters continued to battle a massive, fast-moving Northern California wildfire on Tuesday that has destroyed at least two dozen homes and forced the evacuation of more than 13,000 people.

Cooler weather had helped crews build a buffer Monday between the wildfire and some of the thousands of homes it threatened as it tore through drought-withered brush in Lake County that hadn't burned in years.

But the blaze that has charred nearly 97 square miles of brush and timber jumped a highway Monday that had served as a containment line. Its rapid growth caught firefighters off guard and shocked residents.

"There were too many [spot fires] for us to pick up," Battalion Chief Carl Schwettmann of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection told The San Francisco Chronicle, after the stand on Highway 20. "With these drought-stricken fuels, it's just moving at an extremely high rate of speed." 

The fire was burning in the Lower Lake area, about 100 miles north of San Francisco and 10 miles from Clear Lake, the largest freshwater lake entirely within California and a popular spot for boaters and campers. Fire officials said no homes around the lake were threatened.

Crews in the Lower Lake area conducted controlled burns, setting fire to shrubs to rob the blaze of fuel and protect some of 5,500 homes threatened. The fire was burning in a rural area of grasslands and steep hills.

The blaze, dubbed the Rocky fire, has scorched some 62,000 acres since erupting last week in the canyons and foothills along the inland flanks of California's North Coast Ranges, quadrupling in size over the weekend.

Evacuation orders, both mandatory and suggested, were in place for more than 13,000 people living in over 5,530 residences, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

The blaze raced through 20,000 acres in one five-hour stretch on Saturday night, a rate that fire officials described as unprecedented.

What sparked the Rocky fire remained under investigation, but the blaze was one of more than 20 conflagrations across the state following thousands of lightning strikes in recent days, said Cal Fire Capt. Kendal Bortisser.

More than 9,000 firefighters, many of them reinforcements from out of state, were dispatched in California. A third of that force was assigned to the Rocky fire alone, along with 19 water-dropping helicopters and four airplane tankers, Cal Fire said.

Some 6,300 structures — homes, barns, sheds and other buildings — remain under threat after the loss of 24 dwellings and 26 outbuildings last week.

No serious injuries have been reported. But a Forest Service firefighter from South Dakota died on Thursday in a separate, smaller fire in Modoc National Forest near California's border with Oregon. 

Wire services