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It's a waiting game for many who were chased out of their homes by flames from Northern California's North Complex outside Oroville.
High winds late Monday and early Tuesday pushed what was then called the Bear Fire into Butte County, leading to evacuations and warnings for 20,000 county residents.
Many with nowhere to go have been put up in hotels as far south as Sacramento, said Shelby Boston, Butte County's director of employment and social services department.
Bob Buck, who lives on Fire Camp Road in the foothills outside Oroville, has been waiting more than four days to see if his home is still standing.
He said the wind was gusting up to 60 mph when he packed up his two cats and escaped.
"The flames were coming toward me so I left," Buck said. "I was prepared to leave anyway."
He and others were parked Friday on the side of Highway 162 leading into the Lake Oroville recreation area waiting for permission to return.
Buck expressed frustration with a lack of updates on evacuation information while parked across the street from a California Highway Patrol officer enforcing a road closure.
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"It's really screwed up," he said. "Nobody knows nothing. Nobody says anything," he said. "There's hardly anything on the internet."
The Bear Fire has been renamed the North Complex West Zone. It's one of several fires that compile the North Complex Fire, located north of Sacramento, on the Plumas National Forest that started after a series of Aug. 17 lightning strikes. As of Friday, it was 252,534 acres and at 23 percent contai
Buck believes his home is safe because he called his neighbor's landline phone and it rang.
"AT&T said if your phone is still ringing, your home is probably still there," he said.
This latest brush with wildfire has Buck thinking about moving away from where he's lived for 25 years.
"This is my third fire. I don't think I'm going to wait for the fourth," he said.
Buck, 69, said it's tempting to move back to the Lower Columbia River in Oregon where he was born and raised.
Also waiting in the gravel parking lot near the Wagon Wheel Market along the highway was Kenneth Henfling with his two barking Kemma Cur dogs.
He owns two mobile homes on Kelly Ridge and lives in one of them. Others have told him they haven't burned.
"Supposedly right now, they're OK," Henfling said.
He was asleep late Monday night when deputies pounded at his door, telling him to get out.
"(Deputies) ran through there real fast, knocking on doors," he said. "I got what I had on."
He's confident his Harley-Davidson motorcycle is untouched and will still be in his front yard because authorities are patrolling for looters.
He said his Harley is protected with a leather cover and the wheels are locked.
Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said earlier this week that residents were told to evacuate through texts, emails and landline calls through the Code Red system in three languages: English, Spanish and Hmong, along with social media and IPAWS alerts.
He said he and other law enforcement officers raced through neighborhoods and used public-address speakers to warn residents of the approaching flames. They also used a distinctive warning siren they introduced after the devastating 2018 Camp Fire that burned Paradise and surrounding communities.
"When time permitted, we went door-to-door to advise people. When time no longer permitted because the fire was bearing down on us, we used a high-low siren," Honea said.
Mike Chapman is a reporter and photographer for the Record Searchlight in Redding, Calif. His newspaper career spans Yreka and Eureka in Northern California and Bellingham, Wash. Follow him on Twitter @mikechapman_RS. Subscribe today!
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