Evacuations ordered as fire spreads in Calif. wine country
Embers skip across a road amid evacuations Thursday in Sonoma County, California.
A fast-moving wildfire, aided by powerful winds, burned through Northern California on Thursday, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate parts of Sonoma County — the rural wine country 75 miles north of San Francisco that is still recovering from a deadly 2017 blaze.
The Kincade Fire, which started late Wednesday, spread rapidly overnight, burning more than 10,000 acres and growing at a rate of 30 football fields per minute. Authorities were still struggling to fight it Thursday, and the fire remained zero percent contained, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility, told state regulators Thursday that a jumper on one of its transmission towers broke close to where officials say the fire started, near Geyserville.
Although PG&E cut power in the area Wednesday afternoon amid dangerous weather conditions, stretches of the company’s high voltage power transmission lines — which were responsible for the state’s deadliest wildfire — were still operating in the area when the fire broke out, the utility said in a statement.
In the report it filed with the California Public Utilities Commission, PG&E said it became aware of the transmission tower malfunction at 9:20 p.m. PDT Wednesday. The fire began at 9:27 p.m., according to Cal Fire.
The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office ordered mandatory evacuations in the area, including the entire community of Geyserville, and shut down several major roads.
“This is not the time to stay,” Sonoma Sheriff Mark Essick said at a news conference. “This is the time to go.”
As the wildfire torched Sonoma, and others began to spread in San Bernadino and Marin County, Gov. Gavin Newsom railed against the state’s three investor-owned power companies, including PG&E — the utility responsible for the state’s deadliest wildfire ever.
“I must confess, it is infuriating beyond words to live in a state as innovative and extraordinarily entrepreneurial and capable in the state of California, to be living in an environment where we are seeing this kind of disruption and these kinds of blackouts,” Newsom said, echoing statements he made two weeks earlier when PG&E intentionally shut off power to nearly a million customers in a desperate hedge against wildfire risk.
“It’s more than just climate change, and it is climate change, but it’s more than that,” Newsom said. “As it relates to PG&E, it’s about dog-eat-dog capitalism meeting climate change, it’s about corporate greed meeting climate change, it’s about decades of mismanagement.”
“The only consistency has been inconsistency,” Newsom wrote in a letter Thursday to the CEOs of San Diego Gas & Electric Co., Edison International and PG&E.
Meanwhile, in Southern California, “extremely critical” fire risk was forecast as strong offshore gusts there, known as Santa Ana winds, will reach 65 mph in parts of Ventura and Los Angeles counties through Friday.
“The fuels and vegetation are critically dry. The expected weather will create an environment ripe for large and dangerous fire growth, especially Thursday and Friday,” the NWS forecast office in Los Angeles wrote.