Making headway: Crews are corralling biggest blazes as human, property tolls rise
Signs of progress cheered battle-weary firefighters Friday after their multipronged attack using helicopters, air tankers and hand crews significantly corralled the deadly fires spreading across Northern California.
Firebreaks are now encircling nearly half of each of the two biggest fires in the Wine Country as crews shield the cities of Napa, Calistoga, Geyserville, Sonoma and Santa Rosa. The progress was tempered by a rising death toll and new estimates of the destruction: Thirty-five were known to be dead and 5,700 structures destroyed as of Friday night.
Two of the fires in California have been contained and five others burned into each other, combining forces. There are now 17 fires burning statewide, including 15 in Northern California, which have blackened 222,000 acres, or about 330 square miles.
The battle, however, remained far from over as weather forecasters issued red-flag warnings from 5 p.m. Friday through 11 p.m. Saturday, signaling the expected return of the dangerous Diablo winds that
kicked up the disaster on Sunday night.
As if to emphasize that point, authorities Friday evacuated part of the Alexander Valley north of Healdsburg in the Geyserville area as flames from the nearly 11,000-acre Pocket Fire crackled toward the community.
The extreme danger was obvious in a video from a deputy’s body camera released Friday showing the frightening scene from Santa Rosa on Sunday night as fire engulfed the Mark West neighborhood. The deputy is clearly alarmed as he evacuates residents amid showers of sparks, shooting flames and a dark blanket of smoke.
“This is still a very dangerous event,” said Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano, who played the “terrible scene” in the video to make his point. “I really want to impress on people to stay out of the evacuation zones, stay out of the burned areas.”
At least 19 people have died in Sonoma County, eight in Mendocino County, four in Yuba County and four in Napa County.
The six-day inferno marks the deadliest week for wildfires in the state’s modern history, officials said. The fires, taken together, have killed more people than the 1933 Griffith Park Fire in Los Angeles County, which recorded 29 deaths, and the Oakland Hills Fire in 1991, which killed 25.
Still, the death toll is expected to grow as dozens of search-and-recovery specialists with cadaver dogs scour the burned areas looking for bodies. Officials said 235 residents of the burn areas in Sonoma County were still missing. Napa County officials said they had seven missing people and 47 reports of individuals or families who were “unaccounted for” and had not been upgraded to missing.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” said Chief Ken Pimlott, the Cal Fire director, who warned of hot weather, dry conditions and wind. “We are preparing for this. We are moving resources and predeploying.”
The firefight has, over the past two days, become one of the most intensive mobilizations in California history, with more than 9,000 firefighters — some from across the nation — manning the trenches. They have been divided into quadrants, with four incident commanders mapping out plans, directing strategy and organizing the activities of the massive force.
The bulk of the troops are attacking the two most destructive fires.
The first is the 35,270-acre Tubbs Fire, which ignited near Calistoga before spreading west and slamming into the northern part of Santa Rosa, flattening whole neighborhoods. It was 44 percent contained Friday night, up from 10 percent on Thursday.
At least 19 people have died in that conflagration, making it the third-deadliest single wildfire in modern state history.
The other priority is the Atlas Fire northeast of the city of Napa, which did heavy damage in the epicenter of California winemaking and spread into Solano County. It was 45 percent contained — a big gain from the 3 percent estimate Thursday — after burning more than 48.000 acres.
The trick in fighting the fires is to cut off their fuel supply and keep them away from communities, but doing that involves an incredible feat of planning.
Daniel Berlant, an assistant deputy director and chief of planning and risk analysis for Cal Fire, said hand crews have been working on either side of the fires, cutting away vegetation in an attempt to slowly pinch off the burnable area.
Air tankers, meanwhile, are bombarding the ground in front of the fire in an attempt to impede the advance.
“The fire retardant sucks out the oxygen,” he said. “It’s not putting the fire out, it’s slowing it down so the ground resources can build a firebreak in that area.”
Meanwhile, helicopters are dropping water on hot spots where the firefighters are working. Attack planes are deployed high above each fire to direct communication with resources on the ground and to pinpoint where the retardant should be dropped.
The bulldozers are used to build what are called “contingency lines,” which are 50-foot-wide dirt firebreaks anywhere from a mile to 3 miles in front of the fire. Berlant said the incident commanders decide where to build those breaks, with help from fire meteorologists, fuelsbehavior analysts and research on what past fires in the area have done.
“We have to read that fire’s movements, look at the forecast and wind and determine where and how far ahead of the fire to build the line,” Berlant said.
When the flames approach homes or communities, the tactics change from attacking the fire to protecting lives and property, Berlant said. After everybody is evacuated, strike
teams are deployed to identify homes that are in jeopardy and clear away all bushes, trees, woodpiles, flammable furniture and lawn mowers.
“These firefighters are not attacking the fire directly, they are preparing for it and waiting for it to come directly to the home, and that‘s where they take a stand,” Berlant said.
He said the technique they use is to shower the ground in a circle in front of the advancing flames with a hard mist spray from their hoses.
“The home by itself is fuel, so when you turn the hose onto a spray, you are preventing the fire from getting to the fuel itself,” he said.
Once the fire moves on, at that point firefighters will make sure the home is secure, with no hot spots or spot fires and then they move on and protect the next home, Berlant said. If the homeowner hasn’t created defensible space by removing brush around the home, then the firefighters may decide to leave it to its fate.
“That’s a very hard decision and it is made by the fire captain on the ground in a split second,” Berlant said. “This is also why we have spent a lot of effort especially in the past decade to change our way of thinking when we build homes in wildland areas.”
Crews are currently protecting homes on the southern edge of the Atlas Fire near Green Valley, a community southwest of Fairfield in Solano County. Another team is protecting Calistoga, on the northern edge of the Tubbs Fire, he said.
Firefighters are also concentrating on a cluster of five fires, including the Nuns Fire, that merged northeast of Glen Ellen and west of the Napa Valley. They had burned more than 46,000 acres and were 10 percent contained Friday.
The Redwood/Potter Fire has burned 34,000 acres northeast of Ukiah in Mendocino County. It was 10 percent contained. Sheriff ’s officials on Friday released the names of three victims, including 14-year-old Kai Logan Shepherd, who succumbed to flames and smoke as he ran from his home in Redwood Valley.
Meanwhile, the search for bodies continues. On Friday, 50 search-and-recovery volunteers picked through the rubble of Journey’s End Mobile Home Park in Santa Rosa — a tree-lined retirement community on Mendocino Avenue that was decimated in the Wine Country fires.
It’s now a wasteland of torched trees, singed roof shingles, pieces of bathtubs, broken toilet seats and melted electronics. The swimming pool is brackish and filled with ash. The beach chairs are twisted metal.
Sgt. Dave Thompson of the Sonoma County Sheriff ’s Office led the search effort, believing that three to five people had died at Journey’s End. But the crew found the remains of only one of them before decamping. That person has yet to be identified.
In some places in the North Bay, authorities were able to shift their footing Friday, escorting evacuated residents back to their homes, or the wreckage of their homes.
Other parts of Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties continued to operate as disaster zones, with many thousands of people living in shelters inside community centers, gymnasiums and churches. Schools remained closed all over due in part to smoke that permeated much of the Bay Area, sickening people and prompting a run on respirator masks.
In Sonoma County, Santa Rosa could be threatened anew by warm, dry winds — caused when a sloping air mass that travels downhill becomes warm and compressed — which could lead to increased wind speeds. Such winds were a driving factor for fanning flames and rapid growth throughout the wildfires, Peterson said. The wind advisory for the North Bay and East Bay hills said winds may topple trees and down power lines.
“It’s just going to be allaround poor conditions for fire weather,” said Drew Peterson, a meteorologist with the weather service. “The good news is after this event it looks like the conditions are going to be improving through the area, as far as fire weather goes. The winds are going to be subsiding after Saturday.”
Still, he said, “I would keep my eye on Napa Valley. That’s where the most critical fire weather danger is.”