The fires have broken through 500,000 acres, and are still growing.
Deep in its final battle against balloon fighting of wildfires, Northern California is under siege another day, with the enormous bubbles blowing across the region and still growing and still almost completely unrestricted.
Five dead are linked to the fires, which forced more than 60,000 people out of their homes, consuming the air filled with thick smoke and consuming hundreds of homes.
The fires, burning over more than 500,000 acres, were started by lightning in an extraordinary period of more than 10,800 lightning strikes over several days, causing hundreds of fires, including nearly a dozen large ones. When flames hit homes this week, smoke reduced an already oppressive heat wave, lightning strikes sparked new fires, the electricity failed to keep up with demand, and the coronavirus threatened disease in evacuation farms.
At least four bodies were found Thursday, authorities said, including three from a burned-out house in a rural Napa county and a man found in Solano County. On Wednesday, a helicopter pilot died on a water-related mission in an accident in Fresno County.
Firefighters are struggling to contain the biggest fires. One group of fires, called the LNU Lightning Complex, doubled Wednesday in size and nearly doubled again on Thursday, growing to 219,067 acres as it stretched across Napa and four surrounding counties. The fires in that group have destroyed nearly 500 homes and other buildings, many of them in Vacaville, and are responsible for the four civilian deaths as well as four injuries, according to Cal Fire, the state fire department. Firefighters said these extinguishers contained 7 percent.
A combination of fires, known as the CZU Lightning Complex, has forced more than 64,600 people in San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties to evacuate, including the entire University of California, Santa Cruz campus, which was evacuated on Thursday night under a mandatory evacuation request. placed. The fires have grown to 50,000 acres, consumed at least 50 buildings and are completely uncontrolled.
East of Silicon Valley, the SCU Lightning Complex, a group of about 20 fires, had spread over 229,968 acres – mostly in less populated areas – and was 10 percent contained as of Friday morning, Cal Fire said. The nearby San Jose region had led to some evacuation orders, and two emergency workers and two civilians were injured.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a video message for the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, calling the state’s burning stones an “unusual challenge” and linking them to global warming. “If you deny climate change, then come to California,” he said.
Shelter evacuees must risk coronavirus.
A wildfire broke out outside, but inside the evacuation centers there were also risks.
Natalie Lyons and Craig Phillips had to make a decision Thursday morning because they were sitting in their as-coated Toyota Tundra under the beautiful orange sky in Santa Cruz.
After fleeing the small town of Felton on Wednesday when a series of wildfires burned along the Central Coast of California, they sought refuge at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, an evacuation site, but the building was full – and Mrs. Lyons was scared of contracting the coronavirus in an enclosed space.
“There are some people coughing, their masks hanging,” said Ms Lyons, 54, who said she had lung problems. ‘I’d rather sleep in my car than end up in a hospital bed.’
That’s exactly what the couple did. Their car served as a trial bed across the street from the auditorium, and Mrs. Lyons tried to get comfortably in the back seat with her Chihuahua terrier mix and shellshocked cat. “I barely slept,” she said.
Tens of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate from the rural areas of the San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties, Cal Fire said, and many are struggling to find a place to go, especially with the pandemic still raging indoors meetings.
Evacuators further up the coast at Pescadero slept in trailers in parking lots or on the beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Others made desperate pleas for family members and friends to take them in, and local authorities said they preferred people to assimilate into so-called quarantine bags instead of encouraging the deliberate risks of an indoor home.
Cenaida Perez said she smoked smoke early Wednesday morning from her home in Vacaville and walked outside with her 3-year-old daughter, Adriana. She is currently sheltering at a nearby library, but said she was concerned about the coronavirus.
‘Who will not be afraid of that virus? It has killed so many, “said Mrs Perez, 36, in Spanish. “But also, I do not want to die so, burnt to death.”
Smoke from wildfires adds a new concern for doctors fighting the coronavirus.
With smoke from the wildfires making the air unsafe this week to occupy much of the Bay Area and the prospect of a long fire season complementing efforts to control the coronavirus, doctors in Northern California are safe for an increase in patients.
The air quality index, which measures air pollution, has been exceeded in some areas 150, which means that the air is unhealthy for people, even if they have no health risks, and especially dangerous for people who are sensitive to unclean air. The index goes up to 500, but anything above 100 is considered unhealthy.
At a Zoom news conference on Thursday, doctors with the University of California, San Francisco described feeling burnt out, but preparing for an increase in their work pressure. Students, they said, have described the feeling that they are at the center of an apocalypse.
“All of these are a perfect storm of problems,” said Dr. Stephanie Christenson, an assistant professor of medicine at UCSF who specializes in pulmonary, critical care and allergies.
Dr Christenson said that although it is too early to say definitively how wild smoke affects Covid-19 patients, it is known that air pollution can inflate the lungs.
Therefore, said Dr. Christenson, she is worried that smoke from burning can result in “longer recovery time and even hospitalization again,” among Covid-19 patients.
For asymptomatic Covid-19 patients, the irritation of smoke in the air could irritate them to cough, she said, which would increase the risk of transmitting the disease.
The ‘lightning siege’ in California has links to climate change.
A state fire official described it as a “historic lightning siege” – the nearly 11,000 lightning strikes that struck California over 72 hours this week and ignited 367 wildfires.
Such a flurry of strikes is unusual in California, where it normally takes a full year to flash back 85,000 or so, said Joseph Dwyer, a physicist and lightning researcher at the University of New Hampshire. That’s far less than Florida, one of the most lightning-fast states, which averages about 1.2 million flashes a year.
Lightning occurs during storms with strong updates. During these storms, charged ice particles collide in clouds, generating an electric field. If the field is strong enough, electricity can bend to the ground like lightning, which can ignite dry vegetation: Nationally, about 15 percent of wildfires start this way.
Strikes across the United States are expected to increase with climate change, as warmer air provides more water vapor, providing the fuel for harsh conditions. A 2014 study estimated that strikes could increase by about 12 percent per 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) of warming, than by about 50 percent by 2100.
California experienced an intense heat wave this week, and while it’s too early to say exactly how climate change affected this particular attack of hot weather, “it’s likely that there was more lightning due to global warming,” said David M. Romps , a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the lead author of the 2014 study.
“What you can say with certainty is that it was warmer with global warming,” said Drs. Romps. ‘And the vegetation was really drier due to warming. If there were also more lightning strikes, as we would expect, that would just be an extra bump in the direction of more fire. “
Kellen Browning, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Jill Cowan, Henry Fountain en Alan Yuhas reporting contributed.
