Residents Return Home After Frantic Evacuation From Fast-Moving Corral Fire

Updated 2:20 p.m. Monday

After calmer winds and milder weather helped firefighters gain a handle on California’s largest wildfire of the year, residents in Tracy who had been forced to evacuate over the weekend are returning home as they try to recover from the chaos.

The Corral Fire ignited Saturday afternoon and grew quickly amid gusts of up to 45 miles an hour, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

That afternoon, Lucille Holloway, 78, saw the sky go dark and smoke fill the air. She dropped everything to evacuate and wait out the fire at a friend’s house.

“It’s just that feeling of, ‘Oh, my God.’ And just get yourself out,” Holloway said. “That’s the most important thing. Get yourself and your animals. That was what I saw everybody doing.”

A patch of grass on Holloway’s front lawn was burned, but her house was not damaged. Still, recovering from the shock of evacuating and the fear of not knowing what would happen made it difficult to settle back into normal life on Monday.

“I just ran to the store because I knew I needed milk,” she said. “And I said, ‘OK, that’s a normal step. Go in. You’re going to put it away.’ And these are big steps, right? Oh, but it’s true, that’s how you feel.”

As residents returned home Monday, fire crews were focused on mop-up efforts and extinguishing any hot spots, said Cecile Juliette, a Cal Fire public information officer.

The blaze has burned 14,168 acres and was 75% contained after firefighters took advantage of higher relative humidity, calmer winds and lower temperatures to make progress. One home was destroyed, and two firefighters were injured.

All of the region’s evacuation orders were downgraded to warnings by 6 p.m. Sunday evening, and Interstate 580, which had been closed in the area, was reopened Monday morning.

“We are just asking that people who live in the neighborhood come back, but people who don’t live here, please, don’t come here right now because we still have a lot of big fire equipment in the area, and we don’t want to disturb the residents,” Juliette said,

When 14-year-old George Shanko saw the evacuation order Saturday, he immediately started calling his friends in the agriculture community to bring their trailers and start loading up his family’s livestock – show cattle, horses, goats and a dairy cow.

Flames surrounded both sides of the road as their trucks and five trailers’ worth of people and animals drove out of the neighborhood. Visibility was low, and smoke was coming through the truck vents.

“I was thinking, ‘I’m not going to show at fair this year,’” Shanko said.

Monica Perez, who lives next door to a home that burned, said her husband and a neighbor used buckets to get water from their pool to defend the property.

“He said he came in for a matter of seconds to get a drink of water, and he looked out our back window and he said it was all just black. That’s when the fire had jumped in, went in to our neighbor’s property,” Perez said.

Fire trucks were on the street all night defending the houses.

“I mean, they saved our home at the end of the day,” Perez said.

The cause of the fire remains under investigation.

It was burning near a site run by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The lab recently completed a series of controlled burns to eliminate dry grass and provide buffer zones around buildings, but those burns did not contribute to the Corral Fire, a spokesperson for the lab said in a statement.

Although dispatch from the Alameda County Fire Department, which was first to respond to the scene Saturday, advised responding units of downed power lines, it was not clear whether a power line caused the fire. Such notifications go out as a safety warning to crews any time there are possible power lines down, Cal Fire Battalion Chief Josh Silveira said.

“The investigation team is going to do everything in their power to figure out what truly caused this,” Silveira said.

KQED’s Dan Brekke contributed to this report.