CALIFORNIA (From news reports) -- The giant green warehouse known as Shed 17 loomed across the railroad tracks from Debbie Cummins' Alamo Avenue home since she moved there in 1988.
On Friday, she and dozens of her neighbors watched in terror as the building turned into a giant plume of black smoke and flames. The first 911 calls came in just after 12:45 p.m.
"Report of a fully involved commercial structure fire," a dispatcher relayed to firefighters, according to archived radio traffic. "This will be at the mill near the fire station."
Minutes later, a firefighter replied: "This is the entire Shed 17. Probably 50,000 square feet. Fire is now jumping Highway 97, with a strong south wind. We're gonna need at least three alarms on this."
Within minutes, powerful winds blew the fire into Weed's historically Black neighborhood, Lincoln Heights, just to the north of Cummins' home. Dozens of homes burned to the foundations. The fire eventually burned more than 6 square miles. Two women died.
The mill referenced in the radio traffic was Roseburg Forest Products' sprawling lumber mill on the north side of Weed -- a fixture in the community since the late 1800s, and now one of the focal points in a Cal Fire investigation into what the agency calls the Mill Fire.
Where exactly the fire started remains a mystery. Cal Fire hasn't yet identified its origin, and officials with Oregon-based Roseburg told The Sacramento Bee they're cooperating with Cal Fire's investigation. They told the San Francisco Chronicle that the ruined warehouse was used to store unused equipment. The company didn't respond to requests for comment Monday for this story. Weed Mayor Kim Greene and Councilwoman Susan Tavalero say they heard the fire began on the Roseburg property. Numerous residents of this city of 2,600 have heard the same.
Cummins has no doubts. "It started here," she said Saturday, pointing toward the still smoldering pile of twisted girders and mangled sheet metal -- all that remained of Shed 17. "That building."
If investigators determine that the fire did start there, the tragedy marks a potentially difficult new chapter in the sometimes contentious relationship between the city and the lumber mill that has served as Weed's economic backbone for more than a century.
With a staff of about 140, the mill, which produces wood veneer products and has a wood-fired power plant that generates electricity, remains one of the largest employers in the city an hour south of the Oregon border.
The mill -- once owned by timber baron Abner Weed, the city's namesake -- went through a succession of owners before Oregon-based Roseburg acquired it in the 1980s.
Environmentalists, neighborhood groups and the city itself have battled Roseburg for much of the past two decades over concerns about air pollution and the city's water supply.
If it turns out Roseburg is responsible for starting the Mill Fire, the company is going to need to act quickly to help those who lost everything, said Bruce Shoemaker, a founding member of a group that contested a company proposal to sell a water source the town had used to a private company. He said affordable housing is hard to come by -- an ongoing problem since the 2014 Boles Fire destroyed nearly one-third of the city's housing stock.
"These people need places to live," he said. "They don't need (homes) five years from now, after a long lawsuit."
ENVIRONMENTALISTS FIGHT POWER PLANT
Weed City Councilman Bob Hall has been in the middle of recent fights over Roseburg's plans.
"They think I want to close the mill down, and I don't," Hall said. "I really don't. I just want them to be good neighbors."
Hall's fight with Roseburg began back in 2006, when the company proposed building a new power generation facility that would burn wood chips. The heat from the burning would generate steam to spin turbines and create electricity. Hall, who lives near the site, was worried about air pollution from the cogeneration plant wafting into surrounding neighborhoods. Residents in the working-class neighborhood had long suffered from health problems and had higher rates of cancer, said Hall, a former nurse. Hall became allies with local environmental groups that filed suit in an unsuccessful effort to block the plant, arguing that it would foul the air and create enormous noise pollution problems. Hall said his work with what he called "tree huggers" wasn't exactly popular in the timber town, where many were still angry over environmentalists gaining protections for the northern spotted owl, a move that they blamed for curtailing logging in much of the surrounding forests. Other mills around the region had already closed. At one point, Roseburg threatened to shut down the Weed mill, due to the environmental group's legal challenge, Hall said. And Roseburg, he said, made sure to let everyone know who would be to blame. "They put an ad in the paper saying that they were going to reevaluate the business here due to a couple of agitators ... that are making problems for them," he said. "That was a PR thing. But they created a bunch of hate for me. I had people that were driving by honking at all times at night, throwing things at the house. Quite honestly, I was so intimidated for about five or six days, I didn't even leave the house." Roseburg ended up building the plant over Hall's and environmentalist's objections. The company signed a contract in 2019 to sell much of the electricity generated by the biomass plant to a coalition of buyers, including the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and the city of Los Angeles, according to records filed with the California Energy Commission. The environmental planning documents Siskiyou County officials prepared for the biomass plant makes scant mention of any potential fire danger, and an draft environmental impact report notes that there's a fire station near the site. The biomass facility wasn't damaged in the Mill Fire. "Because the project site," the report reads, "has been continuously used for wood milling since 1904, no viable timber resources exist within the area to be affected by the proposed construction of the cogeneration facilities; therefore, there is minimal risk for the exposure of wildland fire hazards to people or structures in the area." The Roseburg mill suffered serious damage in the 2014 Boles Fire, which started elsewhere in Weed and ended up torching more than 150 homes.
A BATTLE OVER WEED'S WATER
Hall and environmentalists might have been in the minority when it came to concerns over Roseburg's co-gen plant, but a more recent battle with the company over the city's water supply angered a much broader group in town.
When Roseburg bought the mill property in the 1980s, it also acquired the rights to a natural spring that supplies the city with water. For decades, Weed had paid the mill's owner a symbolic $1 a year to use the spring as the city's water source. But Roseburg made a deal to sell water to Crystal Geyser Roxane, which runs a water-bottling plant in Weed. In 2016, Roseburg began charging the city $97,500 a year for its municipal supplies. The company also directed the city to begin looking for a new source, according to an account in the New York Times.
"It really felt like the new leadership had stabbed the town in the back," said Shoemaker, one of the founders of Water for Citizens of Weed, a group that fought to keep the city's access to the spring. "For the company to turn around and say, 'Go find your own water,' it was really shocking to a lot of people."
Roseburg sued the city when officials and neighborhood activists began filing protests with state regulators. Weed ended up spending more than $1 million in legal fees to fight the company.
After years of stalled negotiations and countersuits, Crystal Geyser agreed to buy the water right from Roseburg. Last year, Crystal Geyser sold Weed access to water for a payment of $1.2 million over 12 years. But many in town still remember the water dispute.
"People were traditionally loyal and devoted to Roseburg," said Karen Rogers, an environmental activist who was involved in the fight over the biomass plant. "That issue divided a lot of people."
REBUILDING AFTER THE FIRE
William Pugh, whose 86-year-old father, Willis, lost his home in Lincoln Heights, hasn't been following the controversies with the mill's owners over the years.
All he knows is the place where he had family reunions and once ran and played as a child is now sooty ruins behind crime scene tape.
"It's not going to have the memories as the old place that, you know, you grew up in," he said. "You're not gonna have those memories anymore."
Given his and the city's past interactions with the timber company, Hall, the city councilman, said he's not particularly optimistic that Roseburg would step up to help residents such as Pugh, if it turns out the company is at fault.
"I think," he said, "there's going to be a long, long battle."
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