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Everybody out! Evacuating an entire city to prep for fire season

On Saturday, May 30, Incline Village, Nevada held a citywide fire drill meant to rehearse what everyone should do if a catastrophic wildfire threatened the towns 9,000 residents.

By Kyle Dickman, Bloomberg | Updated on June 08, 2015

(Bloomberg Business) — It’s 9:30 a.m., and the Mill Creek fire has been raging for two hours. Already more than 400 vacation homes in Incline Village, a resort town on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, have been evacuated, and an additional 1,100 houses need to be cleared in the next few hours. Volunteers in fire-resistant yellow shirts knock on the doors of million- dollar mansions, alerting homeowners that they need to leave—now. National Guard soldiers in Humvees patrol the streets to prevent looting. Overhead, a twin-rotor Chinook helicopter, one of four copters on the scene, banks a slow turn and drops 2,000 gallons of water on a plume of purple smoke.

Mike Brown, chief of the North Lake Tahoe Fire District, watches the helicopter and then points to a pink ribbon hanging from a deck railing. Green means the homeowners have evacuated. Pink means they’ve chosen not to.

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