How the Valley fire exploded into one of the worst in California history

Joni Prather was tending store at the Yogi Bear campground outside this tiny mountain town when she saw the puff of smoke. "Grass fire," she thought. The smoke was rising about a half mile upwind, created by a small fire that had somehow ignited — the cause is still under investigation — burned through the corner of a utility shed, and crept across the brown lawn in front of a large house. Prather watched the smoke rise over the trees as, half a mile away, the flames climbed alongside a steep driveway to a neighbor's vacation house. When the smoke turned black, she told herself: "It got a structure." She was right. Consuming that house appears to be what gave the Valley fire the critical mass of heat and energy it needed to become a lethal monster. Black scorch marks high up the Ponderosa pines show the reach of the flames. Intense heat from the burning house flash-dried the leaves of a nearby oak tree. Here in the Mayacamas Mountains that hover above Clear Lake, 100 miles north of San Francisco, California's drought has been going on for seven years. Pine beetles have attacked the stressed gray pines, leaving dead timber standing. A century of fire suppression has built up thick undergrowth. When a freakish jet of wind howled up Putah Creek on Sept. 12, it whipped the Valley fire into a conflagration that rocketed it into the ranks of the worst in California history. The wind sent embers as far as a mile to kindle new fires that spawned new embers. Winds rushed through the valley at speeds of some 60 mph. Within minutes of the fire's start, a helicopter, always standing at the ready during fire season, dropped off a Cal Fire captain and his three crew members to corral the spreading blaze by hand, and took off to fetch water from a nearby lake. The four firefighters immediately ran into trouble. Scorch marks show the fire was high in the tops of trees when it climbed the now-black knob where they had tried to make a stand. They deployed their fire shelters and radioed for help, said Jim Comisky, a retired California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection battalion chief who lives nearby. Comisky said Jim Wright, a Cal Fire division chief who also lives nearby, heard the distress call and drove into the fire to get the men, pushing them into his pickup. Within 10 minutes, two helicopters were dropping water, and in 15 more, DC-10 air tankers were painting the valley and the overlook to the east, on which stood an old-style family camp resort, Hoberg's, with pink fire retardant. It wasn't enough...more