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Lava Fire Evacuee Recalls Embers Falling From The Sky In Lake Shastina

The Lava Fire taken from Amy Kolb Tucker's house on Monday before evacuating. She and her family safely relocated to Etna, CA.
Amy Kolb Tucker
The Lava Fire taken from Amy Kolb Tucker's house on Monday before evacuating. She and her family safely relocated to Etna, CA.

The Lava Fire continues to burn in Siskiyou County, about 3.5 miles from Weed, California. It’s estimated to be 13,300 acres.

The wildfire had been burning for three days when Amy Kolb Tucker got an evacuation warning on Monday at her suburban home in Lake Shastina. Soon after however, large wind-driven embers started coming down in her neighborhood.

“That’s when we got really concerned, because it wasn’t just ash falling from the sky, there were large particles falling from the sky,” Kolb Tucker says.

Large embers from the Lava Fire were falling around Amy Kolb Tucker's house on Monday before she evacuated.
Amy Kolb Tucker
Large embers from the Lava Fire were falling around Amy Kolb Tucker's house on Monday before she evacuated.

Within an hour the warning was upgraded to an order to evacuate. She and her family took their motorhome to her sister’s house in Etna, about 50 miles away. Kolb Tucker says she’s found few details about the state of her community besides what residents are reporting from emergency scanners on social media.

“When we could climb our hill and see the progression of the fire, we had this sense of ‘Oh, we’re okay.’ And now, being miles away and not knowing anything, I think that’s pretty stressful,” she says.

On Tuesday, responding fire agencies said they were reinforcing protections around the city of Weed, as well as focusing fire prevention efforts on the Lake Shastina and Juniper Valley areas.

An excessive heat warning is in effect until 11 PM on Thursday because of dangerously hot temperatures. Highway 97 is closed for approximately 30 miles from Weed northeast to Juniper Lodge.

Detailed evacuation information can be found on the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Facebook page.

Erik Neumann is JPR's news director. He earned a master's degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and joined JPR as a reporter in 2019 after working at NPR member station KUER in Salt Lake City.