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SLO County Chimney Fire Containment Grows to 51%

The Chimney Fire in northern San Luis Obispo County has slowed considerably in the past 24 hours with containment on the fire growing to more than 50 percent as of 7PM Friday night.

The nearly two week old fire has burned more than 45,000 acres and destroyed nearly 70 homes and buildings since it began on August 13.

All Chimney Fire evacuation orders and warnings for residential areas around Lake Nacimiento in San Luis Obispo County have been lifted but others remain in place for areas in Monterey County.

The fire is moving further north into Monterey County involving areas of Fort Hunter Liggett U.S. Army Base and the Los Padres National Forest.

“All black is our containment line and anything red is still open fire line”, says Cal Fire’s Jay Smith pointing to the Chimney Fire progression map Friday afternoon, “hopefully this will be a turning point for us on the fire and we can add more black to the map.”

Containment is slowly increasing along the western and northern flanks of the fire.

“All throughout this area our crews have been hitting it really hard”, Smith says, “we’re focusing most of our effort so far on this which is a bit of a slop-over that we had yesterday.”

About 4,000 firefighting personnel remain on the Chimney Fire incident working 24 hour shifts.

A grateful community is preparing to come together and show its thanks and appreciation for the massive firefighting effort with a public rally Saturday morning in front of Flamson Middle School in Paso Robles.

“We get to go home at night and have dinners and be with our families and there’s some of these guys that have been going for 20, 30 days with no break”, says rally organizer Trisha Butcher, “they deserve to know that the community supports them and what they are doing.”

The rally begins at 7am in front of Flamson Middle School at the corner of Spring and 24th Streets, which is along the route the firefighters use going to and coming from the fire lines.

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