Wildfires in California sparked by “historic lightning siege” destroy dozens of homes

Wind-driven, lightning-fueled wildfires swept through every province of Bay Area except San Francisco on Wednesday, ripping residents out of their beds, destroying dozens of homes on the edge of Vacaville and threatening hundreds more from the Wine Country to the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Carmel Valley. .

Houses also burned in the town of Bonny Doon, just north of Santa Cruz, on Wednesday afternoon.

The historic siege of Sunday’s lightning, with more than 10,800 strikes, caused 367 fires across most of Northern California, Cal Fire said Wednesday.

With unrelentingly high heat and low humidity, the air quality in the Bay Area on Wednesday was the worst on the planet, with so many fires burning smoke in so many directions that no matter where you were, it was not clear which fire was responsible. was for the ashes raining down on cars and houses.

“We are experiencing fires like we have not seen in many, many years,” Goochier Gavin Newsom said Wednesday. He noted the Camp Fire in 2018 that devastated the northern California city of Paradise and killed 86 people, such as the Kincade Fire in Sonoma County last year that destroyed 120 buildings was tragic but concentrated in their areas, causing multiple fire agencies to burn them down. This week’s lightning-lit fires are widespread and stretch already reinforced springs thin, but many of them are at greater distances. Still, he said, “we have to keep waiting.”

Adding to the complexity of the fire response, twice as many evacuation booths were opened in Vacaville to create social distance in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

“My recommendation is that all citizens of California be ready to go if there is a wildfire,” Calnet spokeswoman Lynnette Round said Wednesday. “Residents should pack their bags with your nose to your driveway so you can leave quickly. Everyone should be ready to go, especially if you are in a wildfire area. ”

There are too many fires burning to give each one their own name, so firefighters have become accustomed to dozens of smaller fires along with an alphabet soup with names – the CZU in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties and the SCU in Santa Clara, Contra Counties in Costa and Alameda. The LNU Lightning Complex fire in Sonoma County grew Wednesday morning large enough to get formal names, the Meyers Fire, which burned 2,500 acres, and the Wallridge Fire, which burned 1,500 acres.

Using Cal Fire resources thin and mutual assistance along the way, difficult decisions were made about the minute which areas would receive helicopter assistance and which would not. Some 6,900 fire crews are working to put out fires from the state, but it is not enough.

“We have requested 375 fire engines from the state this morning,” Round said. “Originally we asked for 125. Now we have asked for an extra 250. We absolutely need the help.”

Firefighters had difficulty making fires during the day with fires during the day because temperatures remained high and humidity even at night.

In Vacaville, the fire broke out so fast on hard-hit Pleasant Valley Road on the outskirts of town late Tuesday night that runner Taylor Craig had no time to evacuate his goats, chickens, horses and llama.

He never received an evacuation warning on his phone, but from the moment he saw the orange glow over the mountain around midnight, the fire had been whistling in his neighbor’s property for about 15 minutes. And suddenly he and his family are running for their lives. Fortunately, a neighbor told Craig later that he had plowed through Craig’s gates to escape his animals.

Craig did not know if his house would survive, but says he has never seen so many days in a row as much as this, and worries what that means for this fire and future extinguishers.

‘I’m a climate refugee,’ he said under a hazy orange sky, sitting on the sidewalk of his RV in a Walmart parking lot, where staff pour out water, snacks and masks to other evacuees who are collecting them. “And these people are, too, whether they know it or not.”

The band of blizzards that make up the Santa Clara Unit Lightning Complex has crossed about 50 miles from north to south and into five different counties, firefighters said in an update Wednesday morning. The largest and most challenging of the fires were in the Canyon Zone, the majority of which burned in the Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties, but had also spread to small parts of Santa Clara and Alameda counties.

In Contra Costa County, Deer Zone fires were expected to “contain” well over the next few days, said Tim Ernst, chief operating officer with CalFire. Several fires in the Calaveras Zone, which includes the Santa Clara provincial line -Alameda splits, “have grown together” in one lie, Ernst said, while firefighters continued to work to put out smaller flare-ups before merging as well.

Firefighters hope to divert resources to the Canyon Zone once they stop a fire in the other two zones. The fires in the Canyon Zone were “very challenging,” Ernst said because of his topography. In total, they had burned about 85,000 acres and were 5% occupied as of 7 a.m. Wednesday.

In Felton’s mountain town of Santa Cruz, evacuees gather in a Safeway parking lot.

Donna Marykwas, 57, her husband, Steven Passmore, 62, and daughter Maya Passmore, 18, of Long Beach, lived in their RV and volunteered this summer at Big Basin State Park as campers.

When the lightning storms danced through the wooded mountains over the weekend, strong winds damaged their RV garden. Tuesday night they could not return it. When the flames got closer and they were instructed to evacuate at 11 a.m., they had to load their dog, Skye, and cat, Junebug, into their pickup truck and flee.

“We were the last people out,” Marykwas said. They first went to the Brookdale Lodge just south of Boulder Creek and had just enough time to shower all the trash when they were told to evacuate as well, and were in the morning in the parking lot of Safeway down Highway 9 in Felton , with other firefighters.