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California Fire Updates: Emergency Declared as Residents Flee and Power Goes Out
Driven by gusty winds, the Kincade fire north of San Francisco was still growing on Sunday, and power was shut off to millions of customers to prevent more outbreaks.
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Pacific Gas and Electric warns of a new round of preventive blackouts that may come during the week.
The governor has declared a state of emergency.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California declared a state of emergency on Sunday, saying the high winds that have been fueling the blazes in the state were “unprecedented” and pleading with people in evacuation zones to flee.
The Kincade fire, the largest of more than a dozen wildfires now active up and down the state, has burned more than 30,000 acres since Wednesday night in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, and was only 10 percent contained on Sunday. Local authorities have ordered more than 180,000 people to evacuate from its path.
“We are deploying every resource available, and are coordinating with numerous agencies as we continue to respond to these fires,” Mr. Newsom said, noting that more than 3,000 firefighters were battling the Kincade fire alone.
Nearly 1,000 more firefighters are working to contain the Tick fire in Southern California, which was burning more than 4,600 acres on Sunday morning and threatening thousands of homes in Los Angeles County.
At least three new vegetation fires were sparked on Sunday, one covering 600 acres in Tehama County, 100 miles north of the Kincade fire, and one affecting 200 acres near Vallejo in the Bay Area, where embers apparently jumped about a mile across the Carquinez Strait to start another blaze on the far side. That fire threatened the campus of the California State University Maritime Academy.
Californians far beyond the immediate areas of the fires are being affected, as one of the state’s main power utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric, has shut off power to nearly 1 million homes and businesses to prevent its lines and equipment from sparking new fires in the dry, windy conditions. Many people who fled the Kincade fire were leaving behind dark houses where the electricity had already been shut off.
“It is critical that people in evacuation zones heed the warnings from officials and first responders, and have the local and state resources they need as we fight these fires,” Mr. Newsom said.
About 180,000 people have been ordered to evacuate.
Emergency responders greatly expanded a mandatory evacuation zone on Sunday morning, more than doubling the number of residents who have been told to flee the Kincade fire north of San Francisco.
The expanded evacuation zone now covers about 180,000 people, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office said. “This is the largest evacuation that any of us at the Sheriff’s Office can remember,” the office wrote on Twitter. All residents who had previously been under an evacuation warning have now been ordered to flee.
The wind continues to plague firefighters who are trying to beat back the raging blaze. Winds gusting higher than 80 miles an hour are sending embers up to a mile away, leading to spot fires that can quickly grow if they are not extinguished, especially in extremely dry conditions, officials said. A gust was clocked at 93 m.p.h. in Sonoma County.
“We’ve got rates of spread that are extremely dangerous at this point, with erratic fire behavior,” said Capt. Stephen Volmer, a fire behavior analyst at Cal Fire, the state firefighting and fire prevention agency.
The possibility that the fire could jump across U.S. Highway 101 and rapidly move west is a growing fear for firefighters, given that there is more fuel and less recent experience with wildfires on that side of the highway, making the fire’s course more difficult to predict.
“That area hasn’t seen any fire history since the 1940s,” Captain Volmer said, adding that the vegetation in that area is extremely dense, old and dry.
The Kincade fire, which began late Wednesday night, has destroyed 79 buildings, including 31 homes, and damaged 14 more. No serious injuries have been reported.
About 90 to 95 percent of people in the mandatory evacuation zones are fleeing, said Sgt. Spencer Crum of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office. He said deputies would not force people out of their homes or arrest them if they refused to follow the evacuation order, but that “they will be on their own in the event of an emergency.”
Power shut-offs have begun that could affect nearly 3 million.
The number of customers who will have their power cut off preventively by Pacific Gas & Electric keeps rising. On Sunday morning, the utility said it had cut power to 940,000 homes and businesses across Northern California to keep the company’s lines and equipment from sparking additional fires, and that 20,000 more would have their power cut in the coming days. That would leave nearly 3 million people intentionally without power, in the largest planned blackout to prevent wildfires in California’s history.
The company was also dealing with unplanned outages caused by high winds, but said it did not have a tally of how many customers were affected by those problems.
PG&E has faced heavy criticism from lawmakers and citizens, who say the company’s infrastructure ought to be able to handle California’s windy weather and continue providing electricity to paying customers without causing fires.
Paul Doherty, a PG&E spokesman, urged customers not to take out their frustrations on field workers, at least one of whom reported that his vehicle had been shot at by someone with a pellet gun.
“We understand it’s difficult,” Mr. Doherty said. “We just ask for our customers and general public to be kind. We just ask their continued patience.”
He said workers from as far away as Florida and Canada had responded to the company’s request for 1,000 extra utility workers to assist with its growing fire prevention effort.
The authorities in several counties implored residents not to call 911 when their lights go out. The sheriff’s office in Marin, where 99 percent of residents were expected to lose electricity, said the county’s emergency dispatch system was already flooded with calls.
Public safety officials warned residents that it could take up to five days to restore power in Marin County and that cellular phone service could be affected by the shutdown.
“Though the weather event will end Monday, power restoration could take several days,” the sheriff’s office said.
Two hospitals had to relocate hundreds of patients.
Two hospitals in Santa Rosa, part of which is within the mandatory evacuation zone, closed down and sent their patients to other facilities early on Sunday.
The Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Rosa said it had evacuated 110 patients to its partner hospitals elsewhere in Northern California, and the Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital sent about 100 patients to nearby facilities outside the evacuation zone.
“Our first priority is the safety of our patients, employees and clinicians,” Amy Thoma Tan, a spokeswoman for the Sutter hospital, said in a statement.
Tom Hanenburg, chief operating officer at the Kaiser Permanente hospital, said all of the company’s hospitals were equipped with emergency generators, and that the Santa Rosa hospital had an evacuation plan ready when a mandatory evacuation was ordered for its location at 4:30 a.m. Sunday. The company’s hospitals in San Rafael and Vallejo are in areas where PG&E has cut off power, but where there are no evacuation orders in force, and they remain fully operational with emergency power, Mr. Hanenburg said on Sunday.
The hospital evacuations were reminiscent of the scene in Santa Rosa in 2017, when nurses at the Kaiser Permanente hospital wheeled patients to waiting ambulances as flames raged only a few hundred feet away. Some nurses who helped with that evacuation lost their own houses in the destructive wildfires that year.
PG&E says another round of blackouts looms this week.
Pacific Gas & Electric warned on Sunday that a renewed burst of strong winds and dry conditions forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday may necessitate another round of preventive power cuts.
Those potential shutoffs, which could affect 32 counties throughout the state, were announced within hours of the power cuts on Sunday that affected nearly 3 million people, the largest fire-prevention blackouts in California history.
The new round would be the fourth time this month that the company has intentionally turned off electricity to large numbers of customers, some of whom had power for only a few hours between earlier blackouts.
The company did not say how many customers might be affected in the next round.
PG&E’s policy of pre-emptively cutting power in the hope of preventing its lines and equipment from causing fires — as has happened several times in recent years — has angered customers, regulators and politicians. Leaders in the Democratic-controlled State Senate have organized a panel to review PG&E’s actions.
‘Red flag’ warnings are up for at least 30 counties.
The National Weather Service issued what is called a red-flag warning on Sunday morning, saying that a combination of powerful winds and low humidity could create what it called a “historic” weather event, with a high risk of fires across all or part of at least 30 Northern California counties.
Gusts of up to 80 miles an hour are expected in some area on Sunday, making firefighting work much more difficult. Besides fanning the flames, the winds can carry burning embers beyond fire lines to new areas that are ripe for ignition because of dry conditions. Near Healdsburg, gusts as powerful as 93 miles an hour have been recorded.
The weather service said the conditions could lead to the deadliest blazes since the 2017 Wine Country fires. The deadliest of those blazes was the Tubbs fire, which grew to 35,000 acres as it destroyed more than 5,600 buildings and killed 22 people.
Thick smoke has shut part of a major California highway.
Wind-buffeted traffic cameras captured images of fleeing Californians caught up in lengthy traffic jams on the main freeway, U.S. Highway 101, near Petaluma in the southern portion of Sonoma County. Residents with their cars stuffed with belongings and supplies have been trying to reach relatives, evacuation centers and places that still have electric power. Most are headed south, toward Marin County and the Bay Area, but a trickle of drivers were headed north, toward the fire.
Late in the morning, the California Highway Patrol said suffocating smoke had made driving nearly impossible on roughly a 10-mile stretch of the highway near the towns of Windsor and Healdsburg in Sonoma County, an area that was ordered evacuated on Saturday. The agency closed that section to traffic.
Videos on social media showed terrified and frustrated drivers lined up for miles as plumes of smoke billow over surrounding areas, with some evacuees saying on Twitter that it was taking more than two hours to drive out of the mandatory evacuation zones. Tim Noyes, an assistant chief with the highway patrol, said given the volume of traffic, it was lucky that there had been no major crashes during the evacuation.
“We still have a heavy flow this morning going southbound,” Mr. Noyes said at a news conference. He warned that traffic lights at many intersections were not working because of the power shut-offs, and reminded drivers to approach those intersections as if there were all-way stop signs posted instead.
Lauren Hepler reported from Petaluma, Calif., and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from New York. Jose Del Real contributed reporting from San Jose, Calif.; Ivan Penn from Burbank, Calif.; and Vanessa Swales from New York.
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