Dry lightning sparks fires around foothills

A swarm of nearly 17,000 lighting strikes last week in the Sierra Nevada foothills produced 23 separate fires that burned 18,000 acres in Tuolumne, Calaveras, Stanislaus and Mariposa counties.

The thunderstorms that barreled through the lower foothills Sept. 2 produced little rainfall, but dry lighting ignited so many fires, so quickly, CAL FIRE gave the fires numbers instead of names.

The most devastating blaze was the 6-5 fire in Tuolumne County which burned 7,070 acres and all but destroyed the small gold rush town of Chinese Camp. Most of the town’s historic structures, some dating back to the 1850s, were gutted by the fast-moving blaze, leaving only hollowed out brick frames.

The 6-5 was the largest fire of the TCU September Lightning Complex, 20 separate blazes that destroyed 95 structures and consumed 14,000 acres in Calaveras, San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Tuolumne counties.

Fire in the Foothills

In Mariposa County, two fires torched 4,600 acres of grassland on the southern tip of the county south of Ben Hur.

It turned beige rolling hills tar black. Up close, the charred grass looked like burnt doll hair.

The 1-4 fire was located one mile west of West Westfall Road and burned 4,451 acres. The much smaller 1-3 fire was close by, near Preston Road and West Westfall, and burned 250 acres.

“That thing moved up the hills in a matter of minutes,” said Tamra Cantrelle of the 1-4 fire which began on a neighbors ranch just before 6 p.m.

Cantrelle, a sixth-generation rancher who manages two ranches with her husband, Kevin, estimated 650 acres of their grazing-land burned.

“The wind was blowing very hard and was switching directions, that made it very unpredictable. Kevin had to move our cows and baby calves to safer ground without much time to spare,” she said.

“My big thing is everyone is safe. We didn’t lose cattle. Fences can be fixed. The grass will grow back,” Cantrelle said, her voice catching with emotion.

Cantrelle’s 81-year-old father, Gary Preston, said, “We’ve never had a fire this large.”

“We’ve had little fires from lightning, but the rain usually puts it out,” Preston said.

The fire, which locals called the Preston Fire, was the talk of neighbors who gathered last week at the Raymond General Store.

Kathy Davis, one of the staff at the store, said she saw the wall of flames coming over the ridge near Eastman Lake.

Early the next morning she was making 75 breakfast burritos for firefighters at the store cafe, something that has become a tradition when CAL FIRE is in the area.

The 4,000 acres of charred grass may force some ranchers to buy more feed this spring.

Damage was mostly limited to fencing that burned. Cantrelle estimates they lost four to five miles of fence.

The area is dotted with picturesque old barns and mining ruins that mostly survived intact.

Firefighters used back fires to save an old barn built 115 years ago by Cantrelle’s “great, great, grandparents” using lumber from the old Sugar Pine Company in Fish Camp.

“They hauled it down the mountain with a team of horses,” she said.

Cantrelle has an old picture of her great aunt as a small child in front of that barn. The photo, the barn, conjoined family heirlooms.

Reminders of time.

“I really wanted the old barn saved,” she said.

History in Flames

Chinese Camp wasn’t so lucky.

The 6-5 fire tore through the historic town in Tuolumne County with ferocity, forcing its 61 residents to quickly evacuate and incinerating many of the buildings that date back to the California Gold Rush.

The Chinese Camp Store & Tavern is one of the few landmarks left standing.

Richard Beale, who has owned the store for eight years, told KTXL-TV in Sacramento, “Nobody’s got fire insurance here.”

“The prices kept going up and in fact doubled last year, so most of the people don’t have fire insurance and they’re wiped out. And these are kind, decent people,” Beale told the station.

Chinese Camp is designated a California Historic Landmark and occupies a unique place in gold rush history as a multi-ethnic melting pot, with Mexicans, Europeans and Chinese from Guangdong in southern China.

“When the Gold Rush happened, the world rushed in,” said Shelly Davis-King, a professional anthropologist who has studied California Gold Rush towns.

Chinese Camp became a central distribution and supply center for the surrounding mining camps.

The 1860 Census shows 195 Chinese living in town, a quarter of its population of 775, with 10 Chinese boarding houses and several Chinese owned businesses.

A Chinese and a white business district developed side by side, on opposite sides of Main Street, in a contentious 19th Century harmony. Along Main Street they planted Ailanthus altissima, or Tree of Heaven, which is native to China.

By 1870, there were 700 hundred Chinese, nearly a third of the town. There were traditional Chinese medicine doctors, cooks, barbers, saloon keepers, tailors and even a musician, according to U.S. Census records.

The Chinese business district vanished long ago, and all that remained was the so-called white business district. Now, that too, is mostly in ruin.

“The loss of these buildings is the loss of a precious resource, and there are fewer and fewer in the state” said Davis-King.

The Cohn-Morris Store on Main Street was built in 1849 by the Walkerly brothers and later operated by Joseph Cohn, a Jewish merchant from Poland. It served over the years as a general store, Wells Fargo Express, telephone office and post office.

All that stands now is its thick brick facade and heavy iron doors and shutters.

Across the road, the International Order of Odd Fellows building, originally constructed in 1863, is now a ghostly shell.

The architecture of Chinese Camp was unique and authentic to a Gold Rush town, Davis-King said.

Chinese Camp was also a natural repository of items unique to the Chinese experience, like Chinese bread ovens and turning spatulas.

Davis-King hopes an effort is made to preserve the existing structures, not demolish them, and to treat the ruins as an archeological site.

She worries, of course, that outsiders will come treasure hunting.

“People who go in and take these things will forever remove one piece of the jigsaw puzzle that will help us tell the bigger story of Chinese Camp,” Davis-King said.

“These are artifacts and they don’t belong to some looky-loo from the Bay Area,” she said.

A ‘Lightning Bust’

CAL FIRE Battalion Chief David Acuna said the swarm of dry lightning that ignited the foothills on Sept. 2, known as a ‘lightning bust,’ is more common in the Eastern Sierra.

But that may be changing.

“A monsoonal dry lightning storm coming up through Central California” is unique, Acuna said. He attributes the unpredictable weather pattern to climate change.

“We’re having longer, wetter springs, which means more fuel with grasses and brush growing. And summers being hotter, dryer, and as you can feel, windy,” Acuna said last week standing amid the ruins of Chinese Camp.

The TCU September Lightning Complex fire involved 2,094 personnel, eight helicopters, 174 engines, 24 dozers, 50 water tenders and 55 crews. There was one confirmed firefighter injury.

Smoke from the Garnet Fire in Fresno County last week moved into the central Sierra Nevada foothills and Yosemite National Park. Lightning also started the Garnet Fire on Aug. 24. Its burned more than 50,000 acres and on Monday was at 14 percent containment.