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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Dozens of firefighters responded on Saturday afternoon to a fire that started along a roadside and resulted in a large spot fire that burned in a nearby vineyard.
The fire began along Westlake Road near the Nice-Lucerne Cutoff and the Rodman Slough.
By Saturday night, Cal Fire Battalion Chief Linda Green, the incident commander, estimated the fire burned a total of 35 acres, including a seven-acre hot spot that had burned near a vineyard in the Robin Hill area.
Green said full containment was expected on Sunday morning.
“We’ll be out here all night,” said Green.
She said the fire area will be mapped on Sunday morning, and the final acreage could change.
The California Highway Patrol shut down a portion of Westlake Road as well as the Nice-Lucerne Cutoff, where flames consumed blackberry bushes and vegetation on a hillside lining the roadway.
The Nice-Lucerne Cutoff was reopened at about 10 p.m. Saturday, according to radio reports.
Green said firefighters were first dispatched shortly before 4 p.m.
When she arrived, the fire was running downhill and away from an area on the side of Westlake Road where there was a pile of dumped trash, including a broken toilet.
The fire scorched a large field of grass and oak trees across the road from the Westlake Seventh-day Adventist School, moving in the direction of the Nice-Lucerne Cutoff.
Green said no structures were damaged. Early on the fire pushed toward buildings on the Lake County Land Trust Rodman Preserve property at the corner of Westlake Road and the Nice-Lucerne Cutoff.
“But then the wind pushed the fire the other way,” she said.
Northshore Fire Battalion Chief Steve Hart said firefighters worked the main part of the fire from the ground.
Nearly an hour after the fire was reported, embers from the fire were reported to have drifted and started a fire on Mackie Road at Robin Hill Drive in North Lakeport.
Lakeport Fire Chief Ken Wells confirmed that the main fire’s embers started the second fire. He estimated it burned about seven acres in and around a vineyard, where he said additional hot spots were popping up.
Air tankers and a Cal Fire helicopter that Green said was from Vina in Tehama County worked the second fire as a crowd of people watched nearby.
Wells said firefighters did some firing operations to help stop the smaller fire, and a dozer line was put around it.
He said there had been concerns that the fire has caused downed power lines in the area. A Pacific Gas & Electric technician visited the scene and it later was reported that there were no fallen lines.
Green said the fire also had gotten close to structures in the Robin Hill area. Some residents there reported the fire coming close to their homes.
The fire’s cause remained under investigation, said Green. An investigator was set to arrive at the scene Sunday morning.
Early Saturday evening, the air tankers on the fire were being made available to go to new fires that had broken out in other areas of Northern California, including the Plumas National Forest, Green said.
Some of the Cal Fire personnel released from the scene Saturday evening had to return to the North Fire, burning near Cow Mountain in Mendocino County, which also began earlier in the day. That fire had burned 150 acres by nightfall.
Local resources had been stretched with a small wildland fire in Clearlake reported not long after the Westlake incident was dispatched.
Northshore Fire Deputy Chief Pat Brown said Williams Fire sent an engine and water tender to cover the district’s Clearlake Oaks station.
Agencies that responded to the Westlake Road fire scene along with Cal Fire included the U.S. Forest Service, Northshore Fire, Lakeport Fire, Kelseyville Fire, Lake County Fire, South Lake County Fire and CHP. PG&E also sent a truck to investigate the initial report of lines down.
Green said no firefighters were injured.
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