The Carr Fire ravaged Redding five years ago. Survivors recall how their lives changed.
There is a bright line marking the change in Diane Mort’s life since the Carr Fire blew into Redding five years ago.
It wasn’t just that the fire destroyed her home and most of her personal belongings. It took more from her than that.
After the fire, her daughter died, and she had to sell her horse, a dear personal companion. She and her husband Tim rebuilt their home, but it didn’t replace what they lost, said Mort, who is now 69 years old.
“You lose your way of life. It’s hard to regroup. I find it very difficult. It's kind of like after the fire we now have a nicer home, but I would have rather kept it the way it was,” she said. “It just felt like it had repercussions beyond just the event, I guess PTSD or whatever you call it. If I hear helicopters now or something, I have a reaction. I don't watch anybody's house burn on TV. No way. I don't want to hear it. I know how it feels. It's horrible.”
How did the Carr Fire start?
The Morts were just two of the thousands of people affected by the Carr Fire, which broke out shortly after 1 p.m. on July 23, 2018, along Highway 299 near the western edge of Whiskeytown National Recreation Area.
A travel trailer pulled by a pickup had a tire blowout. The driver pulled off the road, but sparks from the wheel ignited grass near the side of the highway.
In-depth coverage: Here’s where to find all your questions about the Carr Fire
Two days later, the blaze was already showing "extreme fire behavior," according to the National Park Service, but the blaze had not entered Redding. A fire whirl was seen in Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, and the town of Shasta, just east of Whiskeytown, was evacuated, according to the park service.
But during the afternoon of July 26, the wind came up and pushed the fire east toward Redding. That evening, the blaze created what some have called a fire tornado.
The fire churned through neighborhoods. It destroyed all but two homes in the downtown area of Keswick, headed east, and jumped the Sacramento River.
The mass of swirling wind and flames destroyed indiscriminately with winds that reached 143 mph.
High voltage transmission lines near Quartz Hill Road in northwest Redding were twisted and toppled. Homes were leveled into powder and ash in neighborhoods from Lake Keswick Estates to Mary Lake and Lake Redding Estates, the neighborhood where the Morts live.
Before it was finally contained on Aug. 30, the fire would go on to burn 229,651 acres, destroyed 1,614 buildings and cause $1.68 billion in damages, making it the ninth-most destructive fire in California history. Eight people were killed.
When the Carr Fire reached the suburbs
The Mort’s had lived on Bedrock Lane for 34 years before the Carr Fire hit.
They don’t live in what fire officials call the “wildland-urban interface,” rural areas or where homes border undeveloped lands. The Morts said they thought wildfires happened “out there” where brush and oak trees cover hillsides.
“We're out in the middle of a subdivision. If we were on the greenbelt, it would be different. But, you know, we've got streets on both sides. And there’s one, two, three rows of houses between us and the greenbelt. And it burned all of it,” Tim Mort said.
It was somewhere around 7:30 p.m. or 8 p.m. when the fire came for their neighborhood. The sun was still up, but the sky was black from the smoke when they evacuated from their home on Bedrock Lane.
They quickly grabbed pets and what personal belongings they could and drove out. Bedrock Lane is a short loop of a street, maybe a quarter mile long, that begins and ends on Harlan Drive. Trying to escape the flames, they immediately hit a traffic jam when they reached Harlan Drive.
Diane Mort flailed her arms in the air to describe the wind in the trees. Tim Mort said the flames appeared to be 200 feet tall as they crested a hill near their home.
“I thought we were going to die that night. I really did. And I think a lot of people in this neighborhood did because there's only one path out. I think our house was on fire before we got to Harlan Drive,” Diane Mort said.
The wind blew rocks and other debris that hit their car as they slowly crawled along with neighbors in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Tim Mort’s restored 1955 Chevrolet station wagon overheated when dirt and debris clogged the radiator. His daughter drove his pickup and towed him up the North Market Street hill, where all four lanes had been converted to one-way traffic heading north.
That night, some 38,000 people evacuated from the approaching fire, officials said. And many of them can vividly recall the growing fear as the fire bore down on Redding.
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Memories of the Carr Fire on fifth-year anniversary
Donald and Nancy Fisher have no less of a horrifying story to tell.
The Fishers left their home on Bedrock Lane sometime before 4 p.m. on July 26, but once they were out of the area Donald Fisher decided to return to get some batteries and check on his neighbor, who was in her 90s.
Returning home, he was the only person driving into the neighborhood, he said. Everyone else was leaving. The neighbor he came to check on was gone.
And things had taken a turn for the worse as the fire moved onto his street.
“Everything around here was on fire. And I said 'I'm going to get out of here.' And so I parked my truck. I got to get to the river because I'm looking over my shoulder, and it's an inferno. And then I looked across the street and those two houses exploded in flames at Bedrock and Harlan,” he said.
Fisher, then 82, clambered up on some trash cans to climb a neighbor’s chain link fence to get down to the river. As he swung his leg over the fence he got cut and his skin was punctured. He fell backward, and on the way down he hit a garage door window and broke it.
He was bleeding, lying on the ground and his neighborhood was going up in flames.
“And I thought, man, this is hell on earth,” he said. But he got up and got to his truck. Before he left he took a look around. Five years later, he still remembers the scene.
"The firenado. I was there. I saw it when I was standing up there before I got in my car. I was just, ‘oh my God, this is not possible.' I’m in a T-shirt, right. I'm bleeding like hell, I'm breathing embers and man, I just got in my truck and I got out of there and man, those two houses on the corner, just they looked like a blowtorch,” Donald Fisher said.
He eventually made it out of the neighborhood and reunited with his wife and their son. Later that night, they ended up at the home of a friend who is a doctor, who stitched-up Fisher’s wounds at his house.
Rebuilding after the Carr Fire
Both the Fishers and the Morts found temporary housing until their homes were rebuilt. But the timeline for rebuilding was different for the two couples.
The Fishers’ home was completed about a year later, by September 2019, while it took the Morts two-and-a-half years to get their home rebuilt.
Since the Carr Fire, many of the Bedrock Lane residents are closer as neighbors. They meet once a week for get-togethers. They look out for each other, Fisher said.
Donald Fisher said his wife, Nancy, gets nervous when she hears sirens and helicopters, afraid another fire may be on the way.
They keep a bag in each room of the house so they can quickly grab the personal belongings they want to take in case another fire forces an evacuation, Donald Fisher said.
They also keep a first-aid kit and a bag of clothes and other necessities on hand, ready for the next evacuation, he said.
Reporter Damon Arthur welcomes story tips at 530-338-8834, by email at damon.arthur@redding.com and on Twitter at @damonarthur_RS. Help local journalism thrive by subscribing today!
This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: On anniversary, Carr Fire survivors remember it as 'hell on earth'
