Thousands ordered to flee as blaze threatens homes

Anxiety of autumn: Cycle of devastation, evacuation, outages has people on edge Power lines: Utility begins to rethink undergrounding, but it’s expensive and slow ‘Potentially historic’: High winds hitting Bay Area — blackouts to pick up pace

Autumn seems cursed.

Not so many years ago, the biggest disaster fear for most Northern Californians was the everlooming major earthquake. Then came fire after fire. Year after year, with homes in flames and air filled with smoke. That’s been followed by major planned power outages, with no end in sight.

And just as in 1989 and 1991, when the Bay Area experienced the historic Loma Prieta earthquake and Oakland Hills fire, most of these disastrous events have occurred right around October. This new autumnal fear is jangling nerves, making it harder to sell houses — and driving people away.

“This fire is one of the final straws,” said Rachel Mast, who had to flee her Geyserville home Thursday as the Kincade Fire rampaged toward the town.

For each of the last three wildfire seasons, including the current one, Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s equipment has been involved in one kind of disaster or another. First, catastrophic infernos. Now, massive blackouts — and possibly another fire.

And for each of the last three wildfire seasons, PG&E’s critics have often returned to the same question about the beleaguered company’s equipment: Why isn’t more of it buried underground?

As it turns out, PG&E is starting to embrace the notion that it should swap more of its traditional aboveground distribution lines with underground ones. But it’s a very slow and extremely expensive process, costing about $2.3 million a mile on average compared with $800,000 per mile for building

Fearing what forecasters called a “potentially historic” windstorm this weekend, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. on Saturday began preemptive blackouts that are expected to affect more than 2.5 million people across huge portions of the state in an aggressive attempt to avert catastrophic wildfires.

PG&E said 940,000 homes and businesses would lose power in parts of 38 counties in the Bay Area and throughout Northern and Central California, an increase of about 90,000 customer accounts from the company’s previous estimates.

Before turning power back on, PG&E says it must visually inspect all of the lines it turned off to check for damaged equipment — some 30,000 miles of line, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. CEO Andrew Vesey said

“I’ve been looking at places to move to in Montana or Idaho — far away from these fires, this anxiety over and over.

“It’s very hard to take it anymore. I don’t see it changing any time soon.”

Mast, 38, didn’t have any way to take her pet goats, Missy and Pickles, on Thursday, but fire crews let her into the evacuated town Friday to fetch them. They were fine. The house was still standing. That’s not good enough, she said.

In the 2017 Wine Country fires — which started on Oct. 8 and killed 44 people and destroyed nearly 9,000 buildings — practically every home around Mast’s, outside the edge of Santa Rosa, burned to ash. Hers survived, and eight months ago she moved to what she calls her “dream home” in Geyserville, a countryside village exuding oldtimey, wineregion charm.

“I haven’t been able to live in my dream home much, though, because of the power outages and fires,” Mast said. “I love my community and would hate to leave. But I am seriously considering that now. Too much danger and anxiety.”

Those who lived through the 2017 blazes reckoned that would be it for a while. Surely, that was a onceinageneration horror. But no.

The next year brought the epic fire tornado in Redding and the recordsetting firestorm that wiped out the Butte County city of Paradise, which together turned the period from July to November into a marathon of destruction. And just before 2017, there were a couple of years of catastrophic blazes destroying thousands of homes in Lake County.

Before this era, the worst wildlandinterface fire in Northern California — where homes butt up aganst thick woods — was the 1991 Oakland Hills blaze. It incinerated 3,276 homes on a hot, windy Sunday, killing 25 people. Two years before that, 63 people died in the Loma Prieta quake.

Those tragedies meant years of recovery for the Bay Area, both emotionally and from a construction standpoint. Now, it feels like there are catastrophes on that scale every year around October — wildfires so massive they spew smoke for hundreds of miles, prompting hardware stores to sell out of face masks and clogging medical clinics with patients suffering from breathing difficulties. Some public agencies have even begun posting distress hot line numbers on social media during fire season.

“I think the health effects of the anxiety every year around now may be worse than the health effects of the air pollution,” said Tony Wexler, director of the UC Davis Air Quality Research Center. “I don’t want to minimize the effects of the smoke — for people who have asthma or emphysema, this is bad stuff and they have to be careful.

“But for people who are healthy, the smoke is not as much of a risk. It’s the anxiety, the worry, that can get to people.”

With climate change in full throttle, bringing low humidity and higher winds and temperatures, there is really no turning back, Wexler said. So the trick is to adapt.

“You don’t have to sit on your couch and watch your house burn down,” he said. “It’s fine to live in areas of valleys and hills. You just have to manage the wilderness — not planting fireprone plants, using better firesafe building materials like metal and stucco, getting municipalities and residents to be better about clearing vegetation.

“And stay indoors when the smoke is heavy. We all just need to adjust.”

Dinah Mattos, 76, is fully on board with adapting — she wears smoke masks, which experts say aren’t a failsafe solution but can be useful if people must go outside. That doesn’t mean she likes it.

She picked up a $10 box of two respirators at the Pini Ace Hardware store in Novato on Friday, and was glad to have them as smoke from the Kincade Fire soured the air around her. But she was sorry that things have devolved to this point, after she’s lived in Marin County for 53 years.

“The smoke keeps coming, the outages keep coming, it all changes too fast,” she said. “I’m a walker, so I have to wear the best respirator I can find. But I wish I didn’t. Wasn’t necessary before, was it?”

The other new reality of redflag fire times — widespread planned PG&E power outages — has stores selling out of batteries, ice and water with regularity. Some homeowners are spending $1,000 to $3,000 to install generators, but most are just crossing their fingers and hoping the power stays off for only a couple of days.

For businesses, though, it’s a more costly proposition. Losing power keeps customers away, rots food at restaurants, and costs employees wages if their shifts are canceled. Even just the prospect of outages can hurt.

“It’s discouraging,” said Beth Costa, executive director of Wine Road, a wine tourism promoter and association in Sonoma County. “We have people canceling hotels and trips two months down the road, but the hotels and wineries are open. People can still come and have a good time. There’s no real reason to stay away — even with the power outages, most wineries are prepared to stay open because they have generators.”

More than 3,000 people have moved out of Sonoma County since the 2017 blazes, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. But Rick Laws, a Santa Rosa agent with Compass Real Estate, said he thinks that as thousands of homes are rebuilt in the coming years, the population with regenerate.

Only this time, it will be a little more moneyed.

Laws pointed out that after the

destructionreconstructiondestruction cycle of floods in the 1990s along the Russian River, homeowners got wiser and rebuilt homes and businesses with more elevation and protection. But it was more expensive — and insurance became more expensive. The same will happen in the North Bay fire zones, he said.

“A lot of people are calling this the new normal for October — fires and outages,” Laws said. “And that means we’re going to have do things differently, with better fire readiness, construction materials, undergrounding utilities, and more.

“But there will be a cost for all of that,” he said. “It’s going to drive up prices. Some people won’t have the stomach for that, and they will leave. But there will always be people who will want to be here, who pay the extra cost.”

Count Bill and Kylynn Boutin out on that one.

They lost their home on a 40acre spread along River Road in northern Sonoma County in the 2017 Pocket Fire, and have been living on the property in an RV while they try to figure out whether to rebuild. Being evacuated Thursday because of the danger of yet another fire made up their minds.

They’ve moving to the Central Valley — Chowchilla, maybe. Anyplace but the North Bay.

“I’m going to be 74,” Bill Boutin said. “My wife is going to be 71. Do we really want to go through this crap again?”

Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron

Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle Cliff Nakamura uses his fire hose to wet down his neighbor’s house before evacuating from his own home in Larkfield.

Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle Aaron Johnson, wife Tammy White and daughter Leah Johnson, 11, sit outside their house without electricity Thursday as they watch news on their phone for updates about the nearby Kincade Fire.

Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle Officer Tony Wold with the CHP marks an “X” on the driveway of a home designating that it has been evacuated.