A volatile wildfire less than 10 miles from the long-burning Hirz Fire north of Redding jumped the freeway, destroyed abandoned trucks and forced evacuations all the way to the Siskiyou County border as it ballooned to 15,294 acres Thursday morning.
"There's vehicles scattered all over," Brandon Vaccaro, a public information officer for the Delta Fire said Wednesday. "Whatever occurred here was probably pretty ugly for a while."
The fire was reported at 12:51 p.m. near the Vollmers exit of Interstate 5 just north of Lakehead. Officials said the fire was caused by humans, but they didn't say how someone started it. It had no containment Wednesday evening.
Authorities planned to keep I-5 closed throughout the night.
The blaze comes as the area is already grappling with the destruction and trauma from the devastating Carr Fire, which burned over 1,000 homes and led to the deaths of eight people this summer.