California wildfires: tens of thousands ordered to evacuate
Tens of thousands in California were ordered to evacuate their homes on Thursday as wildfires raged in the north and south, after dry, windy weather prompted the state’s largest utility company to impose sweeping electrical blackouts. More than 40,000 in southern California were ordered to evacuate as wildfires burned near a Los-Angeles area neighborhood. Several homes burned Thursday as two fires fanned by powerful winds swept through dry brush to the edge of communities in the Santa Clarita area. No injuries were immediately reported, but the LA fire chief said there was no containment of either blaze.
Earlier in the day, the Kincade fire, in the Sonoma county wine region of in northern California, exploded to more than 10,000 acres (15 sq miles, or 39 sq km). Authorities ordered evacuations for nearly 2,000 people in and around Geyserville, a small town and popular destination for wine country tourists. By Thursday evening, the fire had grown to 25 sq miles, and was 5% contained.
In Napa county, a large smoke cloud from the Kincade fire marred a clear blue sky. Strong winds whipped through tree branches and yellowing grape vines, bringing respite from the high temperatures and relentless sun.
While the cause of the fire has yet to officially be confirmed, Pacific Gas &
Electric said it had a problem with a transmission tower near where the Kincade fire ignited. The company filed a report with the state utilities commission on Thursday, saying it had become aware of a transmission-level outage in the Geysers region in Sonoma county around 9.20pm on Wednesday.
The wildfire was reported minutes later in the same area, although it is not clear whether the malfunction sparked the blaze.
Dangerous weather conditions prompted electrical shutoffs across the state as PG&E, whose power lines have been found responsible for sparking previous deadly wildfires, and Southern California Edison sought to avoid catastrophe. The blackoutsaffected nearly a half-million people and PG&E announced it would impose more over the weekend.
‘An atmospheric hairdryer’
Climate scientists warned for several days that this was just the beginning of a week of fire weather across the state, with the greatest risk still to come.
Temperatures in towns near the Kincade fire were expected to reach 94F (34C), with humidity around a bone-dry 10%. The NBC meteorologist Rob Mayeda called the high pressure event of extra fast wind and low humidity an “atmospheric hairdryer”.
A National Weather Service forecast for the Bay Area on Tuesday cautioned: “Should we be lucky enough to get through tomorrow’s wind event, we would ask for continued vigilance heading into the weekend.”
High winds reaching 70-80mph are expected in the north bay region from Saturday evening through Sunday evening, if not longer. “There will obviously be fire weather concerns again,” warned the NWS. These conditions could mirror those in October 2017, when 21 major fires together burned roughly 245,000 acres (almost 100,000 hectares) and killed 44 people.
Shifting winds could send wildfire smoke streaming down over the Bay Area on Friday, possibly causing delays to flights at San Francisco international airport (SFO), the National Weather Service tweeted.
Evacuations in wine country
At the Healdsburg Community Center near Geyserville, which became a makeshift American Red Cross shelter on Thursday, evacuees milled around the outdoor spaces, checking their phones and waiting for news.
“I’m sleepwalking,” said Tina Tavares, 70. Tavares and her husband, Victor, woke to pitch-black chaos at 5.30am.
“You wake up and they’ve turned off the electricity and all of a sudden you don’t know where you’re going,” Tavares said. “You go into a wall and you’re feeling around because you can’t feel anything and you have somebody banging on your door saying, ‘Get out, get out!’”
“The smoke was so thick you couldn’t see my hand,” she continued. “All you could see was red, red, red, red.
I just covered my mouth and got right into the car.”
Fire officials said multiple structures had been destroyed but could not yet confirm how many.
The evacuated town of Geyserville sits about 23 miles (37km) north of Santa Rosa, where the Tubbs fire left 22 people dead in October 2017, and Thursday’s fire brought back memories of the devastation.
Rolling blackouts
PG&E on Wednesday began rolling blackouts stretching from the Sierra foothills in the north-east to portions of the Bay Area in a bid to keep the electrical grid from causing fires due to wind that can send power lines toppling.
PG&E confirmed that a second round of outages would occur over the weekend when even stronger winds are expected in the region.
“This could be the strongest wind event of the season, unfortunately,” said Scott Strenfel, a PG&E meteorologist.
Strenfel called the current wind event a “California-wide phenomenon”.
Southern California Edison, the utility to the south, said Thursday that it had cut power to more than 15,000 customers as hot and dry seasonal Santa Ana winds swept parts of southern California. The utility was considering additional power cuts to more than 286,000 customers.
The San Diego Gas & Electric utility said it cut power to about 328 customers.
The utilities have said the precautionary blackouts across the state are designed to keep winds from knocking branches into power lines or toppling them, sparking wildfires.
Electrical equipment was blamed for setting several fires in recent years that killed scores of people and burned thousands of homes.
The latest outage comes two weeks after PG&E shut down the power for several days to about 2 million people in northern and central California.
Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday once again lambasted PG&E for its management of the crisis. “It’s more than just climate change,” Newsom said at a press conference in southern California. “As it relates to PG&E, it’s about corporate greed meeting climate change. It’s about decades of mismanagement. It’s about focusing on shareholders and dividends over you and members of the public.”
The Sonoma county supervisor James Gore said PG&E had been better this time about getting information to people who would be affected, but he was still astonished by the need to resort to large-scale blackouts.
“I am a big believer in shutdowns to prevent fires. But the thing that erodes public trust is when it doesn’t make sense,” he said. “You say: ‘God, I know if we can put a man on the moon ... we can manage a [power] grid.’”
Back at the shelter in Napa county, Tavares and her husband and their two chihuahua mixes, Jake and Savannah, were planning to stay overnight. Though she only slept for two hours, she couldn’t rest with all her fears and worries.
“I’m not too sure what’s going to happen,” she said. “We rent our house. We set it up, we painted the whole inside, we got comfortable. And we might lose everything we put together.”