Chaos of smoke and flames
Thousands evacuated: Hundreds of wildfires raging as Cal Fire tells all residents: ‘Be ready to go’
Hundreds of wind-driven, lightning-stoked wildfires tore through Northern California on Wednesday, touching every Bay Area county except San Francisco, rousting residents from bed, destroying dozens of homes from the outskirts of Vacaville and threatening thousands more from the Wine Country to the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Carmel Valley.
By Wednesday afternoon, firefighters rushed to protect the historic Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton above Silicon Valley, shut down Interstate 80 as another blaze hopped the freeway in Fairfield, and stood ready to protect the rustic mountain town of Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz mountains.
“There’s not even close to enough equipment here,” Scotts Valley firefighter Jeff McNeil in Boulder Creek said Wednesday afternoon. “The state is on fire. We’re stretched very thin.”
More than 250,000 acres were actively burning across the region Wednesday afternoon — a jigsaw puzzle of smoke and flames larger in size than more than eight San Franciscos. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated. And well over 100 structures had burned, Cal Fire said, but the fires were so fast and fero
cious and spread out that officials hadn’t done a full accounting.
At least one person was killed in the growing crisis: A contract helicopter pilot flying solo who was actively making water drops on the Hill Fire in Fresno crashed and died, according to Cal Fire. More than 33 firefighters, often wearing 100 pounds of safety equipment and hoses and working in triple-digit heat, have been injured. Homes scattered throughout the Santa Cruz Mountains, including in the town of Bonny Doon and on the edge of Boulder Creek, were also ablaze.
“This fire is going crazy. It’s not one of these situations from the past where people say, ‘Oh, I’ll stay here with a hose and protect my property,’ ” said Kate Garrison, 41, whose home on Whitehouse Canyon Road above the Santa Cruz coast town of Davenport burned down Wednesday. “This is like a firestorm.”
The fires are so widespread, she said, that her best friend who lives an hour away from her home was also evacuated.
“These forests are designed to burn. I’ve always accepted that,” Garrison said. “But what’s devastating now is that it’s so large and affects so many people I care about. If it’s everybody, how do you reconcile that?”
Temperatures and red-flag wind warnings are expected to drop today, but fire officials expect ruinous conditions again this weekend.
At least 367 fires, mostly in Northern California, were sparked by Sunday’s historic siege of lightning — more than 10,800 strikes, Cal Fire said Wednesday. And most of the fires are burning out of control. Unrelenting high temperatures and low humidity helped turn air quality in the Bay Area and parts of Central California into the worst on the planet, with so many fires sending smoke in so many directions, it was impossible to be sure which blaze was responsible for the ash raining down.
“We are experiencing fires the likes of which we haven’t seen in many, many years,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday.
The one minor bright spot so far is that many of the fires are burning in remote locations, Newsom said, but “we have to maintain vigilance.”
Calls for evacuations continued throughout the day, with fire officials pleading with residents from Felton to Fairfield to leave.
“My recommendation is that all the citizens in California be ready to go if there is a wildfire,” Cal Fire spokeswoman Lynnette Round said Wednesday. “Residents have to have their bags packed up with your nose facing out your driveway so you can leave quickly. Everybody should be
ready to go, especially if you’re in a wildfire area.”
California’s unprecedented convergence of calamities were testing the Golden State’s resolve.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vacaville officials said they opened twice as many evacuation shelters as they would have, to allow social distancing. But there still wasn’t enough space at 3:30 a.m. at the senior center when Shawnee Whaley fled her home on Shady Glen with her mother following in the car behind.
“I could literally see the flames. I was frantic. I grabbed an empty purse, my cellphone, car keys and shoes,” Whaley said at the Ulatis Community Center, wrapped in a Red Cross blanket and still in her pajamas from the night before. “We tried to go on our phones to see if there’s any, anything at all. Did it burn? My mom has five cats. Are they gone? I have a car that I drive to work. Is it there? I don’t know. Do we have a home to go home to?”
Even naming the fires has become onerous. There are too many burning across Northern California to give each their own name, so fire officials have resorted to lumping dozens of smaller fires together into an alphabet soup — the CZU in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties and
the SCU in Santa Clara, Contra Costa and Alameda counties. The LNU Lightning Complex fires in Lake, Napa and Sonoma counties.
With Cal Fire stretched thin and mutual aid on the way, tough decisions were made by the minute as to which areas got helicopter help and which didn’t. Some 6,900 fire crews were working to put out fires across the state. The ranks of the state’s inmate firefighters have been depleted by a COVID-19 lockdown at a prison in Lassen County and inmate releases.
“We’ve requested 375 fire engines from out of state this morning,” Round said. “Originally we had asked for 125. Now we asked for an additional 250. We definitely need the help.”
In Vacaville, the fire came so quickly on Pleasant Valley Road on the edge of town late Tuesday night that rancher Taylor Craig didn’t have time to evacuate his goats, chickens, horses and llama.
He never received an evacuation warning on his phone, but from the time he saw the orange glow over the ridge at about midnight, the fire had whipped into his neighbor’s property in about 15 minutes. And suddenly, he and his family were running for their lives. A neighbor told Craig later that he had plowed through Craig’s fences to allow his animals to escape.
Craig says he’s never seen so many days in a row as hot as this, and he worries what that means for this and future blazes.
“I’m a climate refugee,” he said under a hazy orange sky, sitting on the stoop of his RV in a Walmart parking lot.
The batch of blazes that makes up the Santa Clara Unit Lightning Complex stretches about 50 miles north to south and had crossed into five counties. The largest and most challenging of the fires were in the Canyon Zone, the majority of which were burning in Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties but had also spread into small parts of Santa Clara and Alameda counties.
In Contra Costa County, the Deer Zone fires were expected to be “well contained in the next few days,” said Tim Ernst, an operations section chief with Cal Fire. Several fires in the Calaveras Zone, which splits the Santa Clara-Alameda county line, “have grown together” into one blaze, Ernst said, while firefighters continued to work to put out smaller flareups before they also merge.
In Santa Cruz County, the blaze forced campers from the redwoods of Big Basin, California’s first state park.
“We were the last people out,” said Donna Marykwas, 57, who had been living with her husband, Steve Passmore, and their daughter, Maya, in an RV volunteering as camp hosts this summer.
When the lightning storms thundered through the wooded mountains over the weekend, they had to load their dog, Skye, and cat, Junebug, into their pickup truck and flee. They went to the Brookdale Lodge just south of Boulder Creek at first and had just enough time to shower off all the ash when they were told to evacuate from there as well.
“It was just surreal, the sky was red, the light on the pavement was red, it was real smoky, and quiet,” Marykwas said. “I hope everyone’s OK.”
Sitting on the tailgate of their truck in the Safeway parking lot under a hazy, smoky sky and rain of ash Wednesday morning, Marykwas surveyed the dreary scene and wondered what now.
“I don’t know,” she said. “We really don’t have a plan.”