Vacaville:
LNU Lightning
Complex fires drive residents away, destroy homes.
Hundreds of residents of Vacaville tried to make sense of tragedy Wednesday after being routed from their homes by a lightningcaused fire that raged over hilltops, crackled through dry grasslands and engulfed homes as firefighters struggled to keep up with the flames.
The refugees huddled together at evacuation centers and other safe places and recounted their middleofthenight fear as the LNU Lightning Complex fire raged toward their neighborhoods.
“It was scary,” said Danyel Conolley, who gathered the essentials — dogs, photos, laptop — by flashlight as a wall of orange flames moved toward her house. “It was surreal. The horizon was completely orange. The flames were about a quartermile away.”
The cluster of 20 blazes making up the fire raced out of control Wednesday through Napa, Sonoma and Solano counties, but it was Vacaville that took the brunt Wednesday morning, with numerous evacuations as dozens of homes and other structures were swallowed by flames.
The fire exploded from 46,225 acres in the afternoon to 124,000 by evening, with zero containment. It swept into Vacaville from the northwest, forcing Conolley and her husband, Kenny, out of their home on Oak Hill Court, in north Vacaville.
Smoke and ash were everywhere and the power was out, so they scrambled in the dark, cramming stuff into suitcases and loading their two small dogs, Buddy and Sugar, into the car. Their 16yearold daughter, Ella, rushed back from a friend’s house to help.
“I was running around in circles,” Danyel Conolley, 47, said. “I couldn’t piece together a rational thought. I forgot to pack a lot of things. I forgot my deodorant. I wish I remembered my deodorant.”
Jimmy and Gina Santos also had to crawl around in the dark inside their smokefilled house after their adult son, Jimmy, woke them and told them the hillside they lived on was on fire.
The Santos family packed the kids, dogs and cat and important documents and headed down the hill in their truck, leaving the home they bought only a few months ago to its fate.
“Man, the flames looked scary,” said Jimmy Santos, 46, from the Lighthouse Baptist Church parking lot on Gibson Valley Road, where he parked his truck with his wife, 11yearold daughter, Ava, and cat, Lily. “It was a big wall of flames coming down the mountain.”
As he spoke, his wife wept in the driver’s seat.
“That’s like my dream home,” Gina Santos said between sobs. “We worked very hard to get it, and I just hope we can save it.”
The LNU Lightning Complex fire was one of dozens of lightningcaused blazes raging through the Bay Area and Northern California after a rare tropical heat wave brought powerful thunderstorms at the tail end of a dry summer. So far the fire has destroyed 105 structures and damaged 70 others.
As the flames approached Vacaville, police and firefighters sounded bullhorns and sirens, going door to door and ordering people to evacuate.
Many evacuees retreated to a small patch of land near an orchard on Peña Adobe Road, east of Interstate 80, as an orange blaze engulfed Mount Vaca. By late morning, multiple homes on Pleasants Valley Road had been destroyed.
Joe Inocencio said he and his wife, Debra, considered staying put, given that he had cut all the vegetation and built a fire break around their home on Gibson Canyon Road. They changed their mind and groggily packed up their three parrots and three dogs after a policeman woke them up at 4 a.m., shouting, “Get out!”
The couple learned from a neighbor who texted them a photograph that the fire came within 100 yards of their front door, but their home was spared.
“I was thinking, ‘Man, we should just stay here. We’ve got water hoses all over,’ ” said Joe, 59, as a parrot perched on his shoulder outside the Vacaville Senior Center. “Really, what can you do? You can’t change what’s going on.”
Emily Bennett, 22, stood with her mother, Cindy, and her grandparents outside the McBride Senior Center in Vacaville on Wednesday morning after the family evacuated from their home at 2:30 a.m.
“The whole sky was orange and red,” said Bennett, who was alerted to the danger after an unknown person pounded on the door and yelled for them to leave immediately. “It was very apocalyptic scary.”
The family had no time to grab anything.
They don’t know if their home survived.
The harried and pajamaclad residents of Pleasants Valley Road, which was evacuated along with all connecting streets, said they could see hilltop homes burning off English Hills Road, which was transformed into an ashy wasteland of charred brush and gray ash.
Residents rushed to one another’s aid as the wall of flames approached.
Tim Plowman rushed back from a camping trip in Yosemite after hearing about the fire, only to be evacuated from his home in the Orchard area of Vacaville.
“I already know five people whose houses burned down,” Plowman said as he stood on the roof hosing down the home of an elderly resident of Serenity Hills Road, a quartermile from his home. His son and friends hitched up a trailer and packed up valuables for the man, whose grandson is Plowman’s neighbor.
Not everybody was lucky enough to hear the sirens and alerts.
Sharon Spratt and her husband, Robert, didn’t know they were in danger until their daughter called from Oklahoma at 5:01 a.m. and said she had heard about a fire on social media. They were among hundreds of evacuees gathered inside and outside the Ulatis Community Center, virtually all of them waiting to hear whether their homes had survived.
“We’re ... hoping for the best,” said Sharon Spratt, sitting in a lawn chair outside the evacuation center with her husband. “You can’t predict what will happen.”
The looming catastrophe comes as California struggles to control the coronavirus pandemic.
In a year filled with tragedy, it wasn’t surprising to many people that the gods would kick people when they are down by sending an inferno through their neighborhoods.
“These days,” said Plowman, the man who went to the aid of his neighbor’s grandfather, “anything’s possible.”
Chronicle staff writers Matthias Gafni and Michael Cabanatuan contributed to this story.
Dustin Gardiner, Steve Rubenstein and Peter Fimrite are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: dustin.gardiner@ sfchronicle.com, srubenstein@sfchronicle. com, pfimrite@sfchronicle. com Twitter: @dustingardiner, @steverubeSF, @pfimrite