Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Fire spreads, threatens homes in California
Emergency declared; schools closed
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A fire that forced the evacuation of 50,000 people spread through canyons north of Los Angeles on Friday, jumping a freeway and threatening thousands of homes.
Like the Kincade Fire, a blaze raging through the forests and vineyards of Northern California, the Tick Fire in Santa Clarita was driven by strong autumn winds.
Authorities ordered all public schools in the Santa Clarita and San Fernando valleys to be closed Friday, and the closing of a major freeway snarled rush-hour traffic.
Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles and Sonoma counties because of the fires.
At a news briefing Friday morning, authorities said the Tick Fire had burned 4,300 acres and was 5% contained. They said they had determined that six structures had burned so far.
“However, we know that it’s going to rise today,” said Chief Daryl Osby of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
Osby said that there were actually no active fires at the moment, but that the ground was smoldering and the winds were whipping — they were dealing with “significant and erratic winds.”
The worry is that new fires could ignite at any moment.
“At any moment an ember could get out of our containment line,” he said.
Still, he said authorities would consider allowing residents to return to certain areas by Friday afternoon. Aircraft have been used to fight the Tick Fire, and 600 firefighters have been deployed, he said.
Osby said he was pleased to see so many residents heed the evacuation orders, saying many did so because of memories of last season’s deadly fires. But he said he was concerned that some chose to ignore the orders and were staying in their homes within the evacuation zones.
Dangerous winds continued Friday in the Los Angeles area, challenging the hundreds of firefighters deployed to contain the Tick Fire, the National Weather Service said.
Winds in the mountains will have gusts between 50 mph to 60 mph, and relative humidity will remain in the single digits, said Curt Kaplan, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service who covers the Los Angeles area.
“That’s going to cause extreme fire behavior with rapid rate of spread,” Kaplan said.
Although the winds were expected to subside Friday evening, they were forecast to return Sunday.
“The combination of very dry conditions with strong winds and dry fuels — it’s just not a good combination,” Kaplan said.
The threatening weather conditions arriving over the weekend prompted the state’s largest electrical utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, to warn of another large-scale power outage that will affect areas north and east of San Francisco.
Peak fire season is far from over in California, although the wildfires this year have been less catastrophic as those of the past two years. Fewer than 300 structures have burned in wildfires so far this year compared with more than 23,000 last year. And around 163,000 acres have burned this year, compared with 1.6 million acres in 2018, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The Kincade Fire had destroyed 49 structures and burned 16,000 acres in Sonoma County as of Thursday night, according to the fire agency. About 1,300 firefighters were battling the blaze, which was about 5% contained.
Newsom was set to travel to Sonoma County on Friday to visit communities affected by the Kincade Fire.
Evacuation orders covered 2,000 people, according to authorities in Sonoma County. Wind gusts blew the fire through forests, leaving firefighters with little opportunity to stop or slow down the walls of flames after the fire began Wednesday night. Sonoma County was ravaged in 2017, when the Sonoma Complex fires killed 24 and burned more than 170 square miles.
The utility said it was investigating whether its equipment had been involved in stoking the Kincade Fire. It said it had become aware that a “transmission-level outage” occurred in the area around the time the fire began.
By early Friday, electricity had been restored to most of the utility’s 179,000 customers who were without power Thursday. Most of the remaining customers without power were in Kern County, where high winds continued to blow.
But the utility issued a fresh warning early Friday that meteorologists expected another round of high winds to affect Northern California, beginning today. The company said the weather conditions and the time needed to restore any damaged equipment could leave a far larger number of customers without power for more than 48 hours. Pacific Gas & Electric said it was trying to contact customers who might be affected by telephone, text and email.
Bill Johnson, the utility’s chief executive officer, said this weekend’s weather could bring the strongest winds of the wildfire season so far.
Separately, Southern California Edison had reduced the number of customers it had blacked out to just over 21,000 but kept almost 400,000 customers under warning for possible power shut-off.