(CN) — Residents in much of the Lake Tahoe Basin have been ordered to flee the area as the Caldor Fire continues its rampage through the El Dorado National Forest.
According to updates from Cal Fire, evacuation orders were in effect throughout El Dorado County, extending everywhere from the gated lakefront community of Tahoe Keys and destinations like Heavenly Ski Resort to the Nevada state line. Thousands of residents were instructed to head east on U.S. Route 50 toward Nevada for safety.
Barton Health confirmed it would “completely close” all its South Lake Tahoe facilities, including Barton Memorial Hospital and the emergency medical department. In a statement, Barton said it was relocating all patients to “regional partner facilities.”
As of Tuesday morning, the wildfire has blackened more than 191,000 acres and is about 16% contained, down from 19% over the weekend. It has already wreaked massive damage, destroying 486 residences, including nearly all of the Grizzly Flats community. As of Monday afternoon, the blaze has also damaged 40 structures and five people have been injured. More than 33,000 structures are threatened.
Clay Josephy, a doctor at the University of California, San Francisco, who lives in Christmas Valley south of Lake Tahoe, described in an interview the anxious days before evacuation orders went out for residents on Sunday and Monday. Josephy said he first received an evacuation warning for his neighborhood a few days ago.
“The path of the fire as it enters into Tahoe Basin is basically coming down directly onto my neighborhood,” Josephy said. He said that on Sunday, the reported weather was “benign” and that he thought there could be “positive movement during the day in terms of firefighting efforts.”
But the blaze continued to burn its way up the ridge, threatening everything in its path, including Josephy’s hopeful optimism.
“By noon [on Sunday], Christmas Valley had filled with just the densest, darkest ash shower that I’d seen so far,” Josephy said. Later that afternoon, the evacuation warning became an evacuation order — not just for Christmas Valley, but for a broader swath of the area.
Josephy said he is closely watching the internet for updates. He said that as far as he knows, the fire seems to be approximately a mile from his home.
During a press briefing Monday evening, a spokesperson for the Cal Fire Amador-El Dorado unit said the fire had moved into the Meyers area, where Christmas Valley is located.
"It is not necessarily impacting structures at this moment," the Cal Fire representative said. "We do have a large contingent of resources that have been pushed into that area to assess and assist with the firefight. We expect that to continue into the night, just based on the expected fire behavior and the weather that we will be experiencing over the next 24 to 48 hours."
Officials thanked the communities throughout the South Lake Tahoe region for their compliance with the evacuation orders, though following that guidance could be an emotionally fraught decision for some evacuees. Many waited for hours in traffic on Highway 50 as vehicles packed full of residents and their belongings fled the area.
“There’s a lot of emotions. It’s kind of difficult to parse through them,” Josephy said, describing his empathy for people experiencing displacement from the wildfires and other natural disasters. Though both he and his wife have fled, Josephy said it was challenging to navigate the conflicting emotions of gratitude for his family’s safety with concern for his home.
“Hopefully there won’t be a loss of life, and that’s what really counts,” Josephy said. “Nobody wants to come out and say, ‘I care about my material possessions,’ because at the end of the day, they’re just material possessions. But there’s a lot of love, a lot of blood, sweat and tears; there’s a lot of memories and a lot of life lived in our homes. To leave your home not knowing if you’re ever going to see it again is a pretty strange experience, and I know a lot of people can relate to that.”
