Wildfires Rage in California

Updated October 13, 2017

As fires raged across broad areas of Northern California, Matt Lenzi hiked through smoke-choked vineyards and waded in the Napa River to reach the home his father lived in for 53 years. In its place, he found only blackened debris and ash.

“Every piece of vegetation was gone,” Lenzi said on Tuesday. He had gone back to his home in the hope of finding the pet cat that his father, Carl Lenzi, who is in his 80s, left behind when he fled for his life. “Even the barbecue melted.”

The fires ravaging California’s wine country since Sunday night—part of a wave of fires stretching almost the entire length of the state—continued to burn out of control Tuesday. As of Thursday afternoon, the toll rose to 29 people confirmed dead and hundreds hospitalized. An estimated 2,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged. But with many people still missing, and some areas still out of reach of emergency crews, those figures are almost certain to rise, state and local officials warned.

The cause of the fires is still under investigation, but dry conditions after a hot summer might be partly to blame, Ken Pimlott, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, told CNN.

The two biggest and most destructive fires consumed more than 52,000 acres in Napa and Sonoma counties. They were propelled on Sunday night and Monday by 50-mile-per-hour winds, threatening cities that included Santa Rosa, Napa, and Calistoga. On Monday, Governor Jerry Brown issued emergency proclamations, saying the fires had damaged critical infrastructure and threatened thousands of homes. He also asked President Donald Trump to declare the region a disaster area, which would free up government funds.

The winds died down on Tuesday but were forecast to pick up again later in the week, and Pimlott described the two fires, and a smaller one nearby, as “zero percent contained.”

About 20,000 people followed evacuation warnings, fleeing on foot and by car as the fires overtook their towns. In Sonoma County, 5,000 people took shelter in evacuation centers on Monday night, the county reported, and new evacuation orders were issued on Tuesday. Survivors told of narrow escapes from flames that seemed to erupt from out of nowhere on Sunday night and Monday morning, forcing them to run even before text messages and other alerts were sent out by emergency warning systems.

“We always thought the alert system would give us time, but there was no notice, no warning,” said Maureen Grinnell, 77. She lived in the hills north of Napa with her husband, Sheldon, 89, who uses a walker.

“By the time I started to back the car out of the garage, the house was already on fire,” she said. 

Pamela Taylor, 66, at first watched the fire from the mobile home park in Santa Rosa where she lived, thinking the fire was not near enough to pose a threat—and then, suddenly, it was. “A gigantic fireball jumped across the freeway to the trees around the trailer park,” she said, and within minutes, trailers and cars were ablaze, and people were fleeing.

“There was no turning the gas off,” she said. “There was just running.”

Reported by The New York Times