Fires keep grip on wine country
Smoke fills the air and thousands flee in a region devastated repeatedly since 2017.
HEALDSBURG, Calif. — Fires across California continued to expand Thursday, most critically in the North Bay and Santa Cruz mountains, propelled by erratic winds near the coast and hampered by resources stretched thin by dozens of blazes.
From the Salinas Valley to wine country, smoke as thick as fog in some places made it feel as if flames were everywhere. Thousands fled to shelters and hotels, the COVID-19 pandemic ever present but posing a distant risk compared to fire. In the Sonoma County town of
Healdsburg, under an evacuation warning, residents prepared to leave, some for the third time in four years.
So many fires burned in the low mountain ranges surrounding San Francisco Bay that the region had the world’s worst air quality Wednesday night and Thursday morning, according to the website PurpleAir.
In all, more than 492,000 acres have burned in Northern and Central California — the equivalent of 762 square miles, more than the land area of the city of Los Angeles. At least 134 structures have been destroyed, and while the combination of heat and wind eased slightly Thursday, it is not expected to taper off soon.
“In the past four days, there have been over 370 new wildfires,” said Daniel Berlant, a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection information officer, “with two dozen of the major fires still burning in California.”
He said 60,000 people are under evacuation orders, and 100,000 more are under warnings.
Flames reared up in communities from the dry hills west of the San Joaquin Valley to the edge of San Jose, nearing the famed Lick Observatory, which serves astronomers from the University of California.
They threatened small coastal hamlets, such as Jenner and Davenport, which are far more often beset by fog and brisk ocean breezes.
Officials at UC Santa Cruz, the thickly wooded campus above its namesake city, announced voluntary evacuations, with a designated area for people to gather on the boardwalk.
Just to the east, winds drove fire deep into the redwood forest of the Santa Cruz Mountains, causing extensive damage at Big Basin Redwoods State Park, California’s oldest.
“We are devastated to report that Big Basin State Park, as we have known it, loved it, and cherished it for generations, is gone,” tweeted the Sempervirens Fund, a group dedicated to protecting the redwoods.
“I couldn’t stress more the importance of leaving when those orders come out, I really can’t,” Santa Cruz County Sheriff ’s Chief Deputy Chris Clark said during a briefing Thursday. “There are people that are unaccounted for that we are looking to try to determine where they are, so I stress that, because with this fire you just don’t know how things are going to go.”
The multitude of ignitions were mostly sparked by a summer lightning storm Sunday, which hit at the worst possible time, when the grass and brush were at their driest.
Southern California too broiled under a scrim of smoke converging from several fires started last week, mainly the Apple Fire in Riverside and San Bernardino counties and the Lake Fire in Angeles National Forest.
But the bad air was nothing like the acrid clouds smothering Northern California — the worst of it in the Silicon Valley.
“Smoky and hazy conditions are likely to impact portions of the region through at least this upcoming weekend,” the National
Weather Service said.
Experts advised staying indoors if possible, and wearing a mask diligently outside — for both the smoke and the novel coronavirus, which can be spread by coughing.
In the North Bay area, it was the sense of déjà vu that was most dispiriting. From Fairfield and Vacaville west to the Napa and Sonoma valleys, the region has been devastated repeatedly since 2017 by catastrophic blazes.
On Thursday, Harvest Echols was tired of running from fire, tired of packing up her kids, tired of this wine country town that seems to come close to burning every year. Now faced with her third fire evacuation, she is, she said — as she tried not to cry — “just trying to keep it together.”
That meant packing up the dark gray trailer she and her husband, Healdsburg Vice Mayor Shaun McCaffery, bought just before the pandemic in preparation for the moment that is becoming about as predictable as Labor Day or Halloween: evacuation day.
For the last three years, Sonoma’s inhabitants have been forced out by flames as wildfire season seems to grow stronger and longer.
Echols remembers the middle-of-the-night run she had to do last October when the Kincade fire was close enough that its orange glow crested the nearby hills. Then, she and her two kids, Leo, 14, and Lili, 12, left McCaffery behind to guard the house and headed to a hotel in Sebastapol.
But within hours, pounding on their door alerted them that the hotel was in danger of burning. They fled again, through dark country roads jammed with traffic, finally sleeping in their car in the parking lot of the Santa Rosa fairgrounds.
Two years before that, the deadly Tubbs fire sent them running. They drove hours of winding roads to the coast, renting the only house they could find in Ft. Bragg, a “mansion” she thinks must have cost a fortune but was all they could find. McCaffery still hasn’t told her what they spent.
And though the Camp fire in Paradise in 2018 wasn’t close enough to force them out, it brought its own trauma. A thick smoke settled on Healdsburg, casting them in the dark for days, she said, and leaving her thinking about the dead as she breathed that air.
“To know all those bodies were burned up in there was horrible,” she said.
Fire experts say the North Bay has been hit hard in recent years partly because of PG&E’s power equipment failures but also because of a warmer climate and an influx of invasive species. These include an exotic plant called ripgut brome grass, which has moved into the oak woodlands, said Don Hankin, a geography and planning professor at Cal State Chico.
Much of the region was little touched by fire prior to 2015, making it more fuelrich for a blaze, others note. Within the region, the area scorched by fire between 2015 and 2018 amounted to 50% of what burned there in the previous 65 years, said John Abatzoglou, an associate professor in UC Merced’s engineering school.
Californians may have to get used to it. “I don’t see a future where we’re going to return to many smoke-free years in a row again,” he said.
For the Echols family, the wind mercifully stalled Thursday, allowing them time for an organized retreat. After last year’s evacuation, both kids missed weeks of school. Echols feels like it’s adding up.
“They miss their friends, they miss school, they miss normalcy,” said McCaffery.
McCaffery said their anxiety is becoming normal this time of year in wine country, when the dry grass starts rasping in the wind. “It just kind of wears on people that they might have to go,” he said. “It’s just triggering that emotional reaction in everyone that this is a danger.”
Times staff writers RongGong Lin II, Leila Miller and Luke Money contributed to this report.