Fire forces hundreds to evacuate

DRYDEN, Wash. — A growing wildfire forced a new evacuation order for roughly 400 homes in this central Washington town on Sunday, as firefighters braced for thunderstorms, nearly triple-digit temperatures and low humidity.

“The fire likes those conditions. It makes it burn very hot, very fast,” said Carol Tocco, spokeswoman for the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center in Portland.

Those evacuations came a day after the Fischer fire jumped a road, prompting authorities to order at least 100 homes to evacuate.

Firefighters had been making good progress on the fire near this town about 20 miles northwest of Wenatchee, but late Saturday afternoon burning debris blew across a road and started a spot fire.

Within 15 seconds, a helicopter had dumped 1,500 gallons of water on the spot fire — to no avail. The blaze spread to 15 acres in three minutes.

By Sunday morning, it had burned across 1,000 acres, bringing the total acreage covered by the fire to 3,250. But Sunday afternoon, it had grown so much so fast that fire information officer Art Tasker said he couldn’t even speculate on how much land it had burned.

The fire was spreading both north and south.

“It’s a lot bigger, but we simply do not know,” Tasker said. “It’s grown a lot of acres in a short period.”

The Chelan County Sheriff’s Office ordered a new round of evacuations on Saturday evening, though on Sunday fire officials were still trying to determine how many homes were affected. Estimates ranged from 100 to 300.

Meanwhile on Sunday, about 280 guests and staff of the Christian retreat center Holden Village near Lake Chelan began voluntarily evacuating because of danger posed by the Pot Peak-Sisi Ridge complex of fires. The Chelan County sheriff warned the retreat center and the communities of Lucerne and Domke Lake that one fire in that complex, the 29,500-acre Deep Harbor fire, might move north into their area.