Anderson Explodes! postponed

FIRES SPREADING:
Nancy Geer, liaison officer for the American Red Cross, checks the status of fires and evacuated areas at Cal-FIRE’s incident command center, set up in Fusaro Hall at the Shasta District Fair grounds.

Anderson community leaders were scrambling this past week to make alternate plans for Anderson Explodes!, the community’s $30,000 fireworks extravaganza, even as firefighting crews from throughout the state took over much of the Shasta District Fair grounds.

“We have postponed the fireworks until Aug. 30, the Saturday of Labor Day weekend,” announced Lynn Gilliss, co-chair of the event.

The decision was reached due to three factors: the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal-FIRE) encampment at the fairgrounds, poor air quality and the continuing threat of forest and wild land fires in the surrounding areas, Gilliss said.

“We just felt that it was not a good time to be shooting off fireworks with what is going on in our area,” she explained. “The air quality isn’t the greatest, and people aren’t spending as much time outside as they might have been.”

Gilliss said the event’s executive committee waited until Sunday, at the urging of Anderson Fire Protection District Chief Joe Piccinini, to make the final decision. However, it was evident to most committee members much earlier in the week that a change had to be made.

“It’s a city over there,” said Gilliss of the fairgrounds, where mountains of emergency equipment, food, water, spare parts and medical supplies have grown up almost overnight ever since Monday, June 23, when the local Cal-FIRE officials called for assistance.

Pryo Spectacular, the contractor who has already purchased the fireworks for Anderson Explodes!, has agreed to postpone the display until late August at no additional charge, Gilliss said. The 4-H and FFA students who had been selling $10 tickets in advance of their annual July 3 barbecue have received multiple offers to freeze the meat from butchered Junior Livestock Auction animals that were donated back to the students who raised them until Aug. 30.

And Ken Hartman, Director of Anderson’s Parks and Recreation department, said Friday that he will simply move the Mosquito Serenade — a performance by the local Fire Mountain Rock Band — back to Anderson River Park for a 7:30 p.m. concert Thursday, July 3.

“We’re just going to have a concert for several hours in the park,” said Harman, who had originally considered turning the event into a tribute for firefighters. “If the firefighters want to show up, they are more than welcome to join us,” Hartman said Monday, June 30.

As of 7:30 a.m. Monday, June 30, Cal-FIRE’s Shasta-Trinity Unit was responding to 158 fires on private land with 108 contained and seven still active. Forty-three fires have merged with adjacent fires leaving 48,000 acres burned throughout Shasta and Trinity counties, said Douglas J. Lannon, a battalion chief from Cal-FIRE’s San Bernadino Unit, who is spearheading the distribution of public information to media and emergency service and law enforcement agencies throughout the two-county area.

Although flames have threatened 230 residences and 25 commercial buildings, only two residences have been reported as destroyed, Lannon said.

The incident command center at the Shasta District Fair grounds is responsible for providing communications with and rest and recuperation facilities for most of the 2,099 people, including 701 Cal-FIRE personnel, assigned to fire duty in the two counties. So far, there have been six injuries to firefighters since a lightning storm June 21 and 22 touched off thousands of strikes on federal, state and private lands. In addition, the fairgrounds provides a safety inspection and service area for the 263 fire engines, 91 bulldozers and 88 water tenders that are leading the fire attack, Lannon explained.

As of Sunday evening, nearly $9 million had been spent by Cal-FIRE in attempting to suppress the Shasta-Trinity lightning-caused fires, with costs expected to spiral higher since very few of the fires have been contained.

On the public lands side of the equation, the U.S. Forest Service is reporting four major complexes made up of 139 separate fires, some of which have joined, that have blackened 48,439 acres and injured three of the 1,680 U.S. Forest Service personnel assigned to those blazes, the federal agency reported late Sunday evening.

“We expect to be here at least a month getting a handle on the fires we already have, and then tackling any new ones that sprout up as a result of some thunderstorms predicted for the surrounding mountainous areas during the next few days,” Lannon said.