Air quality falls as blazes slowed
Crews continued to beat back the three massive wildfires burning across the Bay Area on Friday — as smoke covered and diminished the air quality in San Francisco and Oakland.
The air quality in San Francisco and parts of the East Bay reached “unhealthy” levels Friday, and it’s still too soon to tell whether this weekend will provide a respite from wildfire smoke. Some COVID19 testing sites were forced to shut down in San Francisco later Friday due to air quality.
The blazes had scorched a combined 829,948 acres across the Bay Area.
In the North Bay, about 7,000 evacuees from the LNU Lightning Complex have been allowed back into their homes, with repopulation efforts taking place among much of the southern section of the Hennessey Fire, burn
ing in Napa County.
There have been spots of good news for returning residents: More than 450 homes that had been within the fire perimeter were found to not be damaged, Cal Fire said during a news briefing Friday.
But other residents were not so lucky, returning to find their homes destroyed. “This is a really emotional time for many people,” Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Essick said Friday.
Crews fighting the Walbridge Fire in Sonoma County continued to face difficult conditions, including steep, broken terrain and an abundance of fuel from redwoods. That fire had grown to more than 55,000 acres and was only 28% contained, fire officials said.
Guerneville, a small and ordinarily lively summer vacation spot along the Russian River, was slowly returning to life Friday after a nineday evacuation from the Walbridge Fire.
Evacuation orders were downgraded to warnings and residents were allowed to return home. The barricades came down on Highway 116, one of two main routes into town, though
River Road remained closed at the Hacienda Bridge.
Amanda Fisk was on a Zoom call when the order to evacuate came. An acquaintance on the call offered Fisk their home.
That’s when Fisk decided to mention that she was fleeing with her nine cats. Her friend wasn’t dissuaded. So Fisk spent nine days with her friend in Bloomfield, the cats staying mostly in crates in the garage, until the evacuation order was lifted Thursday night.
“They were ready to come home,” she said.
Ed Long, 77, who lives in the Earthship Lodge in Guerneville, didn’t realize the evacuation was mandatory until he saw air tankers flying low over the town. Long, who hadn’t left, realized he needed a backup plan.
“I was ready to walk across the river when I saw those tankers come right over the road,” he said. Luckily, that never happened. On Friday, he was headed into town to check his mail and buy groceries.
“I'm out of food,” Long said. “I've been holed up for a week.”
On Main Street, the galleries, boutiques and restaurants were still closed, though some restaurant workers were tossing out spoiled food and taking deliveries of fresh goods. Hotels were empty, and there was no one at Johnson’s Beach at the foot of Church Street.
A flotilla of orange kayaks and silver canoes sat empty.
In Stumptown, a handful of neighbors, one of them a returning evacuee who had headed to Clearlake (Lake County), caught up. Erica Champion, who lives across the street from the river, never left, though she, her husband and 14yearold son had their Subaru packed up and pointed toward the road.
Champion, who is out of work because of the COVID19 crisis, said her family couldn’t really afford to stay in a motel for the nine days, which is part of the reason they stayed.
“We stayed here the whole time with our son and our birds, giving updates to people and watching over the neighborhood,” Champion said. As the fire neared, they watched helicopters pull buckets of water from the river and fire engines rumble through town.
They had just been shopping before the evacuation orders but still needed to rely on food from two nearby liquor stores that stayed open. “We lived on that liquor store food,” she said. “We lasted nine days, thankfully.”
Finally, after the evacuation order was lifted Thursday night, one restaurant opened and Champion and her family rushed in.
The LNU Complex had burned more than 372,000 acres by Friday evening, and was 35% contained.
That cluster and the SCU Lightning Complex in the East Bay, similar in size and containment, are the second and thirdlargest fires that have burned in California history. The SCU has burned 374,471 acres and is 40% contained.
Meanwhile, crews battling the CZU Lightning Complex in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties have had to deal with an assortment of dangers — from giant, fireweakened trees collapsing and roads crumbling to a potential explosive device that had to be detonated by a sheriff ’s office bomb squad.
The blaze grew to 83,133 acres by Friday evening, fire officials said, but so did containment — up to 27%. More than 10,000 buildings remained threatened by the inferno, while 831 have been destroyed — 820 in Santa Cruz County alone. Singlefamily homes accounted for 575 of the destroyed buildings. Michael Williams and Michael Cabanatuan are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: michael.williams@sfchronicle.com, mcabanatuan@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @michaeldamianw, @ctuan