YREKA, Calif. — Authorities battling wind-whipped fires that have forced the evacuation of thousands of people in Northern California said Sunday that the blazes had claimed at least two lives.
“I have the job of sharing some sad news,” Jeremiah LaRue, the Siskiyou County sheriff-coroner, told a community meeting on Sunday in Montague, a town north of the fires. He asked for a moment of silence. “We have lost two people to this fire. There’s no easy way of putting that.”
In an interview after the meeting, Sheriff LaRue said that the victims were both women, ages 66 and 73, and that they were not related. He added that their names were being withheld until their families could be notified.
The news of the deaths came as firefighters struggled for a third day to vanquish the flames. The Mill fire, which erupted on Friday near a defunct lumber mill in the town of Weed, Calif., has consumed more than 4,200 acres there and in nearby communities and destroyed at least 100 homes. local officials said. Among the devastated areas has been the Lincoln Heights area of Weed, a historically Black community that was founded by Black mill workers in the 1920s.
Witnesses said the fire, whipped by howling winds and red-flag conditions, exploded so suddenly that there was scarcely time to evacuate. By Sunday afternoon, it was 25 percent contained.
The Mill fire was the first of two substantial blazes to ignite on Friday in Siskiyou County, near the Oregon border. As of Sunday afternoon, the larger Mountain fire had raced through more than 8,400 acres and was only about 10 percent contained. Overall, 4,300 firefighters from across California were working to contain those two fires, according to Cal Fire, the state’s fire protection agency.
On Sunday, residents of Weed, a town of about 2,900, and other communities including Lake Shastina, which has a population of about 2,400, were trying to process the destruction and scale of loss.
Stacey Green, a city councilor in Weed, has lived in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood for more than 50 years. But the fire there took everything and left him feeling disoriented and visibly emotional.
“My point of reference is just dirt. Black, gray dirt, and it’s leveled,” he said at a Red Cross evacuation center provided by the Karuk Tribe in Yreka, about 30 miles north of Weed.
Mr. Green was taking a nap on Friday when he heard knocking on his door. He woke up to flames engulfing a tree in his front yard. He then saw that his backyard was on fire, too. Across from his home on Crestmore Avenue, houses were already in flames, he said. Unable to find his keys, wallet or shoes, he left with only his cellphone and the clothes on his back. He walked to a nearby highway in his socks, surrounded by smoke, never to see his home again.
On Monday, Mr. Green will spend his 59th birthday at the evacuation center, not the room he grew up in. The Grand piano, which he learned to play by ear, will not be there. Neither will the photographs of his mother and father.
“I feel like a piece of me is gone. That’s what made me, and that’s no longer there,” he said.
Eddie Russell, who lived in an apartment in Lincoln Heights, was another evacuee at the shelter. There, while eating a dinner of grilled cheese sandwich halves and green beans, he said that he had just moved back to Weed in May from Georgia, where he had lived for two decades, after his mother had died. But in Lincoln Heights, he felt like he was putting down roots.
“That was my home, I was settling down,” Mr. Russell said.
He, too, lost everything in the fire, including a tablet with photographs of his mother.
“All I had was my backpack and the clothes on my back,” Mr. Russell said. But he said he was upbeat, while honest, about his loss and that this would not be the first time he has needed to start over in life.
Many longtime residents of Siskiyou County are also familiar with that predicament. But with the Boles fire in 2014 and the Lava fire in 2021, along with recent fires in Yreka, the continual onslaught of fire evacuations for Siskiyou County has many in the region reeling.
Sheriff LaRue says that these fires are “devastating” to the working-class small towns in the county. He added that residents who live within fire zones can face “extraordinarily” high insurance rates, making it harder for people to afford their premiums or pay for adequate coverage.
The geography of Weed is a factor in its vulnerability to fire. The lumber mill that was the basis for the town’s creation was built in that location because of the winds coming off Mt. Shasta, which dried the timber, Sheriff LaRue said.
But those same winds, along with drought and high temperatures, also serve as a propellant to any fires in the region.
“If you get a fire, it’s like a blow torch,” he said.
Mandy Feder-Sawyer contributed reporting.
