Some evacuees return:
Containment grows; residents urged to remain vigilant.
Recordsetting wildfires continued to burn across the Bay Area, but major headway on containment by the more than 15,000 firefighters on the lines allowed some residents to return home Thursday — albeit with a warning.
“You need to be ready,” said Cal Fire Unit Chief Shana Jones. “We have probably another few months of peak wildfire season, so it’s your duty — it’s your responsibility — to be prepared (and to) help us help you.”
More than 40 new fires sparked across the state since Wednesday, each quickly extinguished, but the high fire risk remains, officials said.
More than 1.6 million acres have burned statewide in recent weeks, compared with 55,000 this time last year.
Over the past few days, firefighters made progress on the megafires burning across the region and with the weather cooperating, several evacuated communities started breathing a sigh of relief and were able to plan their return home. But with headway made, now is not the time for locals to relax, officials said, and definitely not the time for outsiders to gawk.
“This is not really a time for disaster tourism,” Napa County Undersheriff Jon Crawford said. “As we open up these areas that have been evacuated, please remember that there have been homes lost. There’s people who have lost everything other than what they’ve been able to carry with them and, unfortunately in a few places, there’s been lives lost as well.”
Crawford’s plea came as crews continued to battle three large sets of fires in the North Bay, South Bay and East Bay even as some evacuees were allowed to return home, including those forced to flee from Vacaville, UC Santa Cruz, Scotts Valley and along the beaches in Pescadero and San Gregorio, among other communities.
In the garage of a home on Ranch View Road in Santa Cruz, Charlie Keyes McKay, 21, heaved a plastic box filled with framed pictures of him and his older brother Miles from the back of the family’s Mazda.
McKay’s dad is a professor of sociology, and the family has called the neighborhood home for 11 years. Last Thursday, the sky was hazy and light orangered — “like purgatory,” McKay said, when his family got warning the fire was pushing down from the mountains.
They packed up their cars with family photos, favorite clothes, guitars and a painting by his brother.
“It was definitely stressful when it was at 0% containment and it didn’t look it was stopping for anything,” he said.
For the past week, McKay and his parents have been cramped in his aunt’s home in Berkeley, squeezing into separate rooms. They returned home Wednesday as evacuation orders lifted.
“It was really nice to sleep in my own bed,” he said.
Yet despite the allclear for some, the LNU, SCU and CZU complex fires continued to burn, still threatening some communities, with containment below 50% and forcing new evacuations, including in Yolo County.
The northern part of the Hennessey Fire in Napa County, part of the LNU complex, continued to present problems for fire crews Thursday. Flames crossed a part of Highway 16 where Cache Creek enters the Capay Valley, creeping uphill, Cal Fire Battalion Chief Chris Waters said.
As of Thursday morning, the LNU complex was the state’s secondlargest wildfire in recorded history, burning 369,935 acres and destroying 1,080 structures. Five civilians have died — three in a home in Napa County, two in Solano County. At least 1,080 structures have been destroyed and 30,500 remain at risk.
The fire complex is so massive, it took 40 minutes to fly over just one of the branches, said Cal Fire Chief Sean Cavanaugh.
“Everyday is picking a battle,” he said. “At this point we’re trying to win a battle every single day around the complex.”
The SCU fires were not far behind in the record book, now in third place, with 369,471 acres burned, and 28 structures destroyed.
To combat the hundreds of blazes burning across the state over the past 10 days, planes and helicopters have dropped 3.35 million gallons of retardant and 4.69 million gallons of water in the fire zones.
“We are making real good progress,” said Cal Fire spokesman Daniel Berlant. “But we cannot become complacent.”
Though some areas are being repopulated, fire officials were quick to give the public a dose of perspective. It’s already been a bad year, and it could get even worse.
“What scares me is that it’s still August,” said Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin. “We could be experiencing this again.”
All residents need to have a plan to evacuate, including those returning home this time, officials said.
In the meantime, those returning home should check for embers in their attic, avoid white ash or smoldering holes in the ground and immediately report gas problems or damaged equipment.
Repopulating evacuated communities would take time, officials said.
Outside of Vacaville, in rural Solano County, with blue skies overhead, workers and helicopter crews were restringing electrical lines — one of the biggest hurdles before officials can lift evacuation orders and reopen the area to residents.
There was some activity in the neighborhood, from some who had refused to evacuate and others granted a pass to tend to livestock. One woman on Pleasants Hill Road, where many houses burned, had already lifted a new Trump flag to replace the one that had burned, though her home was still standing.
Other residents were at work rebuilding fences or dealing with animals that hadn’t survived. On Quail Canyon Road, all but 15 of one couple’s 45 alpacas had died in the fire. Nearby, two small horses had become ensnared in a barbed wire fence during the fire and died.
Sheriff ’s deputies patrolled the houses that still stood, preventing looters from taking advantage of the situation.
In the South Bay, where crews continue to wage battle against the CZU August Lightning Complex, the blaze had engulfed 81,479 acres in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties and destroyed 746 buildings — 735 in Santa Cruz County alone. It remained at 24% containment Thursday afternoon, with more than 13,305 structures still threatened by the fire.
Residents of Scotts Valley, a community of about 11,000 just 6 miles north of Santa Cruz, celebrated Thursday as officials lifted a weeklong evacuation order. Evacuation orders were lifted in Paradise Park and the Cave Gulch area, Cal Fire said.
Firefighters’ lines held steady along the northern edge of the fire, toward the more populated areas of the Silicon Valley region, Cal Fire Battalion Chief Mark Brunton said, though flames around the Butano State Park are inching their way toward control lines set up by firefighters.
“As far as the operation to fully extinguish it, it’s a slow, painstaking process,” Brunton said. “But we’re getting there.”
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