The latest from Cal Fire puts containment of the Lake Fire at 80 percent. 50 personnel are working the fire on Eastlake Drive, south of Borax Lake. They’re continuing mop-up work and starting to pull back the hoses and pick up excess supplies as they work toward full containment over the next couple of days. The fire started on Sunday and destroyed six outbuildings and damaged several other structures. Meanwhile, there’s continued progress on the Pomd Fire north of Laytonville along Highway 101. It’s now 40 percent contained. That fire started Wednesday afternoon and covers 26 acres. Crews are working on containment lines. Cal Fire says drivers in that area should be careful with the number of response vehicles involved. The cause of both the Lake and Pond Fires is still under investigation.
Those firefighters will have to contend with increasing hot weather building into the weekend. The national weather service says by Sunday, the highs could hover around 100 degrees in interior Mendocino and Lake counties, leading to what they call a moderate heat risk. The hot and dry weather will continue into next week, and forecasters say that could lead to an increasing fire risk, especially north into Humboldt and Trinity counties.
The Lake County Planning Commission is continuing to look over the major development planned for the Guenoc Valley area. When the commission meets Friday morning, members will pick up where they left off last month, considering the reams of documents included in a new environmental impact report for the proposed luxury resort. At their last meeting, commissioners spent four hours talking about the massive development over 16,000 acres near Middletown. The general opinion was that while the project is solid, questions remain about whether the roads leading to and from it would be enough to handle an emergency and evacuation. Developers say they have bent over backwards to address environmental and other concerns and made dozens of changes to fire safety and mitigation plans since the board of supervisors approved it 5 years ago. Since then, it’s been held up by several lawsuits, leading to the revised environmental impact statement. The commission will have to decide on approval of that statement and whether to recommend possible zoning changes to the Board of Supervisors. The meeting is at 9 am at the county courthouse.
