When he closes his eyes at night, Hank Hanson hears sirens in his dreams – a byproduct of nearly 30 years in the wild wild desert of Northern California between San Francisco and Sacramento.
But at 1 a.m. Wednesday, Hanson knew he was not dreaming when he looked up at the hills above his house.
The mountain line, where he and his wife followed the scorching seasonal paths of the sun in daylight, was illuminated as if someone were streaking lights over them and plugging them in.
“It started flowing towards us like a waterfall,” said Hanson, 81.
The fire was one of more than 500 wildfires ignited in California this week from what state fire officials called a “lightning strike” – summer thunderstorms that produce little or no rain, but nearly 12,000 lightning strikes over sun-burnt terrain have erupted.
More than 13,700 firefighters are battling the blaze, the heaviest of which are concentrated in Northern California west of the state capital in Sacramento and east of San Francisco Bay.
The extraordinary range of the flames has pushed fire sources to a point “we have not seen in recent history,” said Shana Jones, head of the Sonoma-Lake-Napa unit of the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection .
With firefighters tightly trained, there was no evacuation warning for Hanson and his neighbors.
Fortunately, Hanson was awake because his electricity was off and the high 95-degree temperature prevented him from sleeping.
He woke his wife quickly, and the two rode in their diesel truck on the way. The air was blowing with car horns as people desperately tried to wake up their neighbors.
Hanson and his wife made it to a hotel room in the nearby Fairfield community, thankful they were alive. They later found out that their house was destroyed by the fire.
The house was actually two houses. The first was a small redwood house originally built in Vacaville in the 1930s, but later relocated to the property. Hanson, who owned a patio cabinet business, bought the property in 1974. He has spent weekends there over the next 17 years, planting walnut, peach, fig and eucalyptus trees.
In 1991, he completed an addition of 3,000 square feet to that house. It had a wine cellar, indoor and outdoor pools plus three rooms.
The fires this week have grown rapidly and, together, have destroyed nearly 700 homes and other structures in the state.
Most of the houses that were destroyed were burned by the fire that took Hanson’s house, the so-called LNU Lightning Complex fire. It is the second largest wildfire in state history and has burned more than 490 square miles.
Hanson said he treated the fire as “an adventure” and spoke up when he escaped his harrowing. But his voice caught on as he talked about the house, especially when he said he would not rebuild.
‘I’ve been working on it for 30 years. It was pretty nice, ”he said. “I would not want to do it on a lesser scale, and I do not have time to top the old one.”
Hanson said he would turn fate into a park and a campground for himself and his friends in the coming years.
But first he had to do some shopping. His tomatoes did not burn. He bought some snakes and planned to return to the ranch in an attempt to water them, assuming the hearts did not eat them first.
“They escaped the whole deal,” he said. “The only thing I have left in the world are tomatoes.”
