Woodside Fire Forces Evacuation of Sonoma County Summer Camp, Homes
Hundreds remain under evacuation orders on Friday as crews battle the Woodside Fire, which broke out on the coast of Sonoma County west of Highway 1 on Thursday night.
The wildfire, which broke out Thursday afternoon, spread across the coast near Jenner throughout the evening, reaching 140 acres by 11 p.m.
While forward progress has been stalled, evacuation orders remained in place Friday morning as crews continued to fight hotspots.
Farm Camp, a private sleep-away camp for children in Cazadero, evacuated campers around 10 p.m. Thursday. Earlier in the evening, the camp told guardians that they were sheltering in place, since their site was outside of evacuation zones.
“We’ve kind of been on call this evening, waiting for updates, watching the fire,” Jeb Conner, whose 10-year-old daughter is a first-time camper, said Friday. “Luckily we knew that they were safe and very detailed emails on what’s happening.”
The family, who live in Richmond, drove to a hotel in Petaluma, where the camp transported 150 people, including nearly 100 kids, by bus last night so that they could reunite with their parents.
Conner said he and his wife had just moved back to the area from Norway after six years, and that the smoke that had wafted to Petaluma on Friday morning, affecting air quality, was a reminder of large Northern California fires in years past.
“We lived here for six years before we moved to Denmark, and it’s a painful reminder of the fires,” he said. “The smell right now just takes back memories from 2020 or 2019.”
It was not immediately clear how many other Sonoma County residents were affected by the evacuation orders, which include the Ocean Cove campground, along with Salt Point State Park and Steelwater Cove Regional parks.
Evacuation zone SON-1D1, which has a population of 350 and spans the coast from Salt Point State Park to Fort Ross Historic State Park, and the Timber Cove subdivision, a community that includes about 100 homes, according to its home association.
Further inland, evacuation zone SON-1D2, which has a population of 265 around Goat Rock and Toners Place, is under an evacuation warning.
Cal Fire spokesperson Tyree Zander said the agency was coordinating with the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and California State Parks to try to get people back into the community.
“The big thing that we have is there are a lot of hotspots throughout the area still,” he said. “We’re also going to bring in a damage inspection team or some members to go through and do damage inspections to get us true numbers of anything that was damaged or destroyed.”
As of 11 a.m., he said, Cal Fire had not been informed of any structures that have been affected by the blaze.
A temporary evacuation point has been set up at Laguna High School in Forestville.
“We’re hoping that we’re not going to have the winds that we had yesterday,” Zander said. “We do have a lot of resources on this incident. We had resources stay overnight on the incident with also our night flying helicopters, and they were able to increase our containment, which is a great success.”
KQED’s Daisy Nguyen contributed to this report.