Firefighters Tuesday afternoon fought a large fire at a Schellville wooden pallet factory that forced neighborhood evacuations, blew up a propane tank and drew almost 100 firefighters from Sonoma, Napa and Marin counties.
The three-alarm fire on Fremont Drive was at the Sonoma Pacific Co., the same pallet business that burned in a massive fire in 2013 and suffered a smaller fire in 2007. The blaze became the first for which emergency personnel used a new alert procedure, developed after the October wildfires, to send a message to smartphones in a select geographic area. Early reports are that the message, similar to Amber Alerts for child abductions, worked as intended in alerting residents of a mandatory evacuation within a half-mile radius of the fire.