1,500 Battle Disastrous N. California Fire

Anticipated winds failed to materialize late Thursday, raising hopes for control of a 6,500-acre blaze that has destroyed at least 24 homes and seriously damaged half a dozen others in this small Sierra Nevada community south of Lake Tahoe.

Six-hundred more firefighters from California, Nevada and Idaho joined the lines, bringing to 1,500 the number working to stop the fire’s northeastward march through the sparsely populated region toward the Nevada line.

Winds of 35 to 40 m.p.h. eased during the day to 10 to 20 m.p.h. Forecasters had expected stiff gusts to spring up again by mid-afternoon. U.S. Forest Service spokesman Jerry Snow told reporters at the firefighting command post in Minten, Nev., “If that sucker starts to blow up, I wouldn’t want to be out there.”

By late in the day, however, that had not happened. No more homes appeared immediately threatened.

The Sierra Pines trailer park was saved as bulldozers ringed it to dig a trench that the flames failed to leap.

Black smoke still hung over the mountains and made the sky hazy in Reno, about 60 miles to the north. Highways through the area remained closed.

The fire began Wednesday morning as a small blaze about 200 feet outside a Toiyabe National Forest campground and seemed to pose no real problem. But the wind snatched the fire from the control of firefighters and pushed the flames downhill into Woodfords, where a sign proclaims a population of 150.

By late Wednesday afternoon, more than 2,000 acres were charred by the flames. Up to 350 people were evacuated from Woodfords and the smaller settlement of Paynesville.

The burned area tripled by Thursday morning. Homes were destroyed or damaged in scattered clusters on both sides of the valley in which Woodfords nestles.

Some Woodfords residents, including members of the 18-member volunteer Fire Department, were openly angry that the Forest Service failed to stop the fire in its tracks at the outset. The volunteers said they responded to the initial alarm, only to be waved away by the federal firefighters.

Woodfords volunteer Fire Capt. Jim Cone, 55, was bitter. He lost his furniture repair shop, the trailer in which he had been living and his partially constructed home. With an anti-smoke bandanna over his mouth and the soot of a long night of firefighting covering his clothes, he stood surveying his $200,000 loss with reddened eyes.

He said he shared the feeling that the Forest Service could have had the fire under control if they had not sent the volunteers away.

“It should have been a routine fire,” he said, “but it ended up being a catastrophe.”

Forest Service spokesman Snow said he could not respond to the complaints by Cone and others because he did not yet know the facts. Alpine County Sheriff Larry Kuhl, whose house survived, came to the defense of the federal forestry people, however. He blamed the wind, which came up at just the wrong time.

‘Got Away’

“It (the fire) just got away from them,” he said.

The sheriff said the latest fire appeared to have been man-caused, but he did not know whether it was intentional.

Elyse Doyal stood looking at a blackened chimney--all that was left of her home--pointing out her charred belongings.

“There’s my antique sewing machine,” she said, indicating a mangled metallic mass. “All those papers--they’re my income tax records. . . . That’s an old ceramic pot-bellied stove. I didn’t know I still had it.”

Then she said, “I can’t feel too bad, because some people have it worse. Next spring, we’ll just start building again.”

The nearby small, yellow house of her son, Lynn Doyal, 40, came through the fire, even though most of the homes around his were destroyed. The flames, he said, came from two directions.

“It just started to explode,” he said. “The fire was moving so fast. I saw it jump 50 to 60 feet at a time.”

Had to Flee

He and a brother were watering down his roof when they realized that they had to flee. They jumped in an old Jeep without doors and drove through a wall of fire. The roar of the flames, he said, “just got louder and louder and louder. . . .”

No deaths and no major injuries had been reported.

Meanwhile, a 200-acre fire that caused more than $100,000 worth of damage to a Southern California Edison Co. hydroelectric project channel near Sequoia National Park was contained. Earlier, two lightning-sparked fires in Yosemite National Park were controlled.