After Lake County Fire Burns Dozens of Homes and Vehicles, Crews Search for Casualties

Updated 2:33 p.m. Monday

A day after the Boyles Fire broke out and swept through brush into a Lake County neighborhood, burning homes and vehicles, authorities on Monday will assess the destruction and search for any potential casualties.

While no injuries have been reported yet, firefighters and law enforcement struggled to get residents out of their homes before they were overtaken by flames Sunday afternoon.

Cadaver dogs will be brought in on Monday to sweep the area, said Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, who represents Lake County. Firefighters will focus on “mopping up,” or putting out any remaining hotspots.

The wildfire started behind a shopping center and moved quickly uphill into the neighborhood. So far, about 30 homes and an estimated 40-60 vehicles, including RVs and trailers, are known to have been destroyed, according to a Cal Fire spokesperson. Those numbers are likely to rise.

“We fully expect that the damage assessment, once we get the final numbers and the number of structures damaged and or destroyed, could go up,” McGuire said.

About 4,000 people are out of their homes because of the fire, including Samantha Tarver, who escaped the fire Sunday with her family. It burned right next to the house she rents on 19th Avenue in the city of Clearlake.

“We were inside watching TV and all of a sudden, my neighbor yells for me to come out and you can see the flames,” she said.

She and her 17-year-old son Jeremy Cova rushed to spray the home with water in an attempt to prevent embers from landing on and igniting the trailer with a blue add-on apartment. She gathered a purse and her two chihuahuas, while her son collected an Xbox and blankets. Within a half hour, they left the house.

“Everything’s orange all around,” Cova said. “We see people walking towards the fire, taking photos and everything. Then you start hearing the sirens go by. Evacuation sirens, getting everyone out.”

They spent Sunday night in a hotel and visited an evacuation shelter on Monday at the Twin Pine Casino along Highway 29 in Middletown to find out when they’d be allowed to return to Clearlake.

As the fire spread rapidly on Sunday, firefighters in helicopters and planes dumped water and retardant to slow its spread.

Kirsten Priebe lives on 26th Avenue in Clearlake. “I could hear those planes as soon as they started going over my house,” she said. “And as soon as I hear that, I know that something’s going on. I run outside and there’s this big smoke cloud.”

Priebe said she’s lived there for 10 years and recalls fires in “almost every year.”

Her neighbor Jeff Stanley rushed outside, too.

“[The planes] coming in, getting ready for the run right over the house,” he said. “The wind is shaking the trees. I could hit them with a slingshot. I got a close-up view.”

Priebe and Stanley are executives with the local water district and inspected the hydrants around Clearlake on Monday to see how they held up.

“You can see they dropped over there, that house is pink,” Priebe said, pointing to a house covered in fire retardant. “There’s pink houses all around here.”

People living in this mountainous part of Lake County have lived through numerous fires in recent years, including the massive LNU Complex fires in 2020. Tarver said she evacuated because of fires before but “they’ve never been as close to me as they were this time.”

About 15 people stayed over at the Twin Pine Casino shelter on Sunday night, McGuire said, and over 30 were there on Monday.

“We’re going to be focused on getting them into longer-term care, into hotels, in the coming hours,” he said.

Much of the affected area is without electricity.

By Monday afternoon, the fire stood at nearly 80 acres and was 40% contained, with its forward progress stopped. Still, firefighters were preparing for expected hot, dry weather.

Weather conditions are expected to remain favorable to fire through Wednesday due to low relative humidity and moderate winds. The hours between mid-afternoon and early evening can be especially dangerous.

Because of that, officials on Monday will “have a heavy complement of resources on the fire,” said Autumn Lancaster, spokesperson for the Lake County Fire Department, noting that they will have to be careful of flare-ups.

“We’ve had fires in the in the past, such as the 2016 Clayton Fire, where we have some sort of containment on it and then the next day, during what we coin the witching hour — where the [relative humidity] is lowest and the winds are highest — and you could see potential flare up,” Lancaster said.

Cal Fire is assisting as well as crews from neighboring Sonoma and Napa counties, with 21 fire engines, two water tankers and one dozer fighting the blaze. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.

No other county has felt California’s wildfire crisis like Lake County. Since the 2015 Valley Fire, over 60% of the county’s land mass has burned.