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“Within two hours, our town was gone,” Clark, who left before the fire swept through, told KXTV on Wednesday. “We were sitting outside town about a mile away, and you could hear propane tanks just exploding.”
Responders on Wednesday evening were still working to get everyone out. Exactly how many wasn’t clear.
“Right now, there are still a lot of people unfortunately in Greenville that did not evacuate. And so, we are having to deal with that … and get all those folks out,” said Jake Cagle, the operations sections chief for California’s fire incident management team.
Much of Greenville was in charred ruins Wednesday — burned and fallen to the ground as thick smoke largely made for a dark, gray atmosphere — daytime video showed.
Elsewhere, flames were consuming frames of buildings that had yet to entirely collapse as thick smoke blotted out.
Other footage from nighttime showed fires raging through wooded terrain, consuming tall trees and lighting the sky with enormous flames. In one spot, furious flames of yellow, orange and red consumed an SUV — its outline barely visible — as trees and a building also burned around it.
“Early indications are there has been significant damage,” Brian Ferguson, spokesman for the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, told CNN in a phone interview.
“We lost Greenville tonight. And there’s just not words for how us in government haven’t been able to get the job done,” LaMalfa said. “We will take up the fight even harder. And more so, we got to win this; we got to stop this. We got to get DC to pay attention, we got to get Sacramento to pay attention.”
‘You MUST leave now’
Residents of the town were warned to evacuate.
“If you are still in the Greenville area, you are in imminent danger and you MUST leave now!! … If you remain, emergency responders may not be able to assist you,” the Plumas County Sheriff’s Office said in a message.
It was 35% contained as of Wednesday night, Cal Fire said.
A red flag warning — which cautions that temperature, humidity and wind conditions combine for high fire danger — was in effect for the area Wednesday and will be for parts of Thursday, according to InciWeb, a US government clearinghouse for fire information.
CNN’s Aya Elamroussi, Chris Boyette and Cheri Mossburg contributed to this report.