Firefighters Battle Shasta Blaze for 6th Day

Exhausted firefighters spent a sixth day Tuesday tackling a 64,000-acre fire in Shasta County that was 50% contained.

The fire, which has destroyed 307 homes in several hamlets along California 299, has caused an estimated $5.5 million in damage. Fire officials warned that flames could overrun containment lines again if forecasts of milder winds prove false.

“ ‘Cautiously optimistic’ is the term we are using,” said U. S. Forest Service official Pam Bowman.

In Idaho, a 257,000-acre fire--the largest of several burning throughout the West--threatened a tree believed to be the state’s oldest ponderosa pine. The branches of the 186-foot tree caught fire Monday evening but it was not clear whether the trunk was burned.

That blaze was about 70% contained by early Tuesday, but authorities had 34 more miles of fire lines to cut.

The Fountain fire in Northern California was the worst of several fires in the region. It has blackened enough commercial timber to build 50,000 houses.

At its peak last week, the fire forced the evacuation of 7,500 people and drizzled ash as far away as San Francisco, about 200 miles to the south.

For the second day, air tankers on Tuesday rained retardant onto the fire as it tested containment lines on two fronts of the oval-shaped burn area.

Along the northwestern edge of the blaze, firefighters used bulldozers in Pit River Canyon to prevent flames from crossing the river into old-growth forests where the endangered northern spotted owl lives.

No new evacuations have been ordered, but people in the Mill Creek subdivision and several roads outside the southwestern edge of the fire were not allowed home.

Elsewhere in California, firefighters said a wildfire moving through 7,600 acres of timber and brush in the Mammoth Lakes area near Yosemite National Park was 30% contained. The blaze, which forced the evacuation of 1,000 people, was expected to be doused by this weekend.

In La Jolla, a brush fire burned about 60 acres in Torrey Pines State Reserve on Tuesday, threatening rare pine trees, firefighters said.

The blaze began about 12:40 p.m., San Diego Fire Department officials said. The cause was unknown. Firefighters hoped to control the blaze by today.