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Janie Har for Associated Press has the latest in new outbreak of wildfires in California.
She reports that firefighters say they are hopeful the dying winds will allow them to bring down a wildfire that broke out in Northern California’s wine country, prompting tens of thousands of evacuations, while a second fire killed at least three people.
The glass fire tore through Napa and Sonoma counties on Monday, tripling in size to about 56.6 square miles (146.59 square kilometers) without any containment. About two dozen homes had caught fire, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
The dry winds that gave the flames a fierce shove appeared to have subsided Monday night and firefighters were feeling “much more confident,” said Ben Nicholls, division chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire.
“We don’t have those critical burning conditions that we were experiencing those last two nights,” he said.
The Glass Fire is one of nearly 30 wildfires burning around California and the National Weather Service has warned that hot and dry conditions with high winds from Santa Ana could remain a fire hazard in Southern California through Tuesday.
So far in this year’s historic fire season, more than 8,100 California wildfires have killed 29 people, burned 5,780 square miles (14,970 square kilometers) and destroyed more than 7,000 buildings.
Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin, who lives in the Oakmont area of Santa Rosa, obeyed the order to flee Monday night. It took her nearly two hours to crawl down a jammed road to get to safety.
Gorin’s house was damaged in another fire three years ago and she was rebuilding it. She saw three neighboring houses on fire as she fled.
“We have experience with that,” he said of the fires. “Once you lose a home and represent thousands of people who have lost homes, you become quite fatalistic that this is a new way of life and sadly a normal way of life, the mega fires that are spreading all over West”.
Gorin said the fire in his area appeared to have been caused by embers from the Glass Fire.
Numerous studies in recent years have linked the largest wildfires in the United States to climate change due to the burning of coal, oil and gas. Scientists say climate change has made California much drier, which means trees and other plants are more flammable.
