SAN FRANCISCO _ A series of fast-moving fires in the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere in Northern California _ many caused by intense lightning storms _ exploded overnight, burning homes and causing thousands to flee.
The newest fires stretched from wine country to the Santa Cruz Mountains, moving with ferocious speed amid an intense heat wave that also has brought rolling blackouts. Smoke from the fires has caused terrible air quality across the region.
Many of the fires were believed to have been caused by lightning strikes. Northern and Central California began experiencing an unusually active sequence of largely dry lightning strikes Sunday morning, the most widespread and violent in recent memory in the Bay Area on one of the hottest nights in years, according to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California, Los Angeles and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Over the last 72 hours, there have been some 10,849 lightning strikes throughout California, state officials said.
As of Wednesday afternoon, 367 major fires were burning statewide, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
"This fire season has been very active and, not surprisingly, that activity has taken shape in a number of counties up and down the state," he said during a news briefing.
At this time last year, crews had responded to a total of 4,007 fires throughout the state, Newsom said. They've already been dispatched to 6,754 this year.
More than 300,000 acres have burned statewide in 2020, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. By comparison, California wildfires charred about 270,000 acres in 2019, the smallest number since 2011.
The rapid outbreak of new blazes has stretched the state's firefighting resources to their limit.
Jeremy Rahn, the lead Cal Fire public information officer for the LNU Lightning Complex fire, said Wednesday that the state had already requested 375 additional fire engines as well as additional hand crews from out-of-state agencies, and hired "nearly all available private firefighting 'call when needed' aircraft in the western United States."
"The size and complexity at which these incidents are burning is challenging all aspects of emergency response," he said during a media bri
efing Wednesday. "Firefighting resources are depleted as new fires continue to ignite."
Newsom, however, expressed confidence that California is prepared to rise to the challenge and thanked the leaders of other states _ including Arizona, Nevada and Texas _ for their pledges to send additional resources.
California is "putting everything we have on these fires," he said, and "we're now getting the support of some of our partners in the Western United States, and for that, again, we're very grateful."
The LNU Lightning Complex fire, which has burned more than 46,000 acres, is composed of at least three major zones in Napa, Sonoma, Solano, Yolo and Lake counties.
The most serious fire in the complex appears to be the Hennessey fire, which began Monday morning on the eastern edge of Lake Hennessey in Napa County and marched into Solano and Yolo counties Wednesday morning, forcing residents to flee overnight and burning homes and other structures.
As of Wednesday evening, 50 structures had been destroyed, 50 more had been damaged and 1,900 were threatened, fire officials said.
Officials have ordered the evacuation of the western edge of Vacaville _ a city of 100,000 residents about halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento. The Vacaville Fire District also ordered evacuations of Pleasants Valley Road, which lies west of the city, and the English Hills and Gibson Canyon Road areas north of the city. A KPIX-TV reporter tweeted a video of a home burning off Pleasants Valley Road.
The fire was also forcing the evacuations of some northern neighborhoods in the city of Fairfield west of Interstate 80. By Wednesday afternoon, the fire jumped Interstate 80, forcing it to shut down in both directions between Manuel Campos Parkway in Fairfield to Lagoon Valley Road in Vacaville, the California Highway Patrol said.
Evacuation orders and warnings were also issued for a stretch of Highway 121 in the Vaca Mountains northeast of the city of Napa, and in the mountains about eight miles northeast of St. Helena.
A second grouping of fires in the LNU Lightning Complex is north of Lake Berryessa, burning in northern Napa and southern Lake counties. It's made up of the Gamble, Morgan, Spanish and Green fires. Officials Wednesday afternoon ordered evacuations for Lake County residents living around Hidden Valley Lake and Jerusalem Valley.
The third group of fires is in Sonoma County and has triggered evacuation warnings on both sides of the Russian River. The Walbridge fire was burning north of Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve and the community of Guerneville on the Russian River. South of the Russian River, evacuation warnings were issued as a result of the Meyers fire.
Vegetation throughout the area is extremely dry and considered to be in severe drought, according to Cal Fire.
Officials said the Wallbridge and Meyers fires were likely to push southeast Wednesday as they burned through timber and the coastal forests' understory.
The complex's northern fires _ the Gamble, Green, Morgan and Spanish _ were burning through brush and oak woodland and heading south toward Mount Vaca.
The Hennessey and Markley fires southwest of Lake Berryessa were moving toward Yountville and Oakville, pushed by winds going downslope over ridgetops.
Should those fires continues their march south, they may eventually reach the burn scars of the 2017 Atlas fire, one of several that tore through California's wine country that year.
Burn scars from recent fires can make a significant difference in how a fire behaves. Earlier this month, crews in Southern California caught a break when the western flank of the Lake fire _ which is burning near Lake Hughes _ hit an old 2013 burn scar and slowed to a crawl.
The fires have sent American Red Cross staff and county workers from across the Northern California region scrambling to prepare for evacuees, said Denise Everhart, the Red Cross' Pacific Division disaster executive.
The Red Cross has set up between 10 and 15 temporary evacuation points where residents' needs are assessed before they're sent to a hotel or motel. Everhart said that while more than 100 families were placed in rooms Tuesday night _ some driving up to an hour away for lodging _ it's not a sustainable model if the evacuations continue to expand.
The LNU Lightning Complex fire may trigger up to 35,000 more evacuations, Everhart said, explaining that historically, between 1% and 3% of evacuees go to shelters.
She sought to assuage any concerns that going to a shelter could put people at risk of the coronavirus.
"We've put precautions in place," she said. "If you're told to go, go. We're all working together to keep people safe. ... The fire is the risk."
Though emergency officials have opened multiple evacuation centers in Vacaville, many of those forced to leave their homes in the middle of the night were setting up camp in parking lots instead of entering buildings.
Those with RVs had generators up and running and their front awnings open. Others sat in folding chairs by their cars or in their front seats. Still more had already checked into local hotels, where rooms were filling fast.
Shawnee Whaley and her 79-year-old mother, Sharon Whitaker, sat inside an evacuation center Wednesday afternoon wrapped in American Red Cross blankets.
Whaley said they had no warning that the fire might be a threat when they went to sleep Tuesday night. But when Whaley was woken up by a phone call from a friend and saw that the power was out, she flung open her front door and "saw the glow of the fire." She used a ladder to climb onto her roof and spotted flames approaching.
Barefoot and still wearing pajamas, she ran across the street to her mother's trailer to wake her. Whaley grabbed a mask and her glasses but forgot her wallet. She left the front door open so her cat, Jitterbug, could hopefully escape.
Lloyd Broughton, 78, evacuated after a firetruck came up his road at 3 a.m. He, his wife Anne, 73, and daughter Kristine, 35, gathered their seven rescue cats and packed two cars.
All three suffer from breathing problems and, with a heavy layer of ash falling, they were already coughing and having trouble, Kristine said.
While evacuating during a fire is always a stressful experience, it's been made all the more so because of the coronavirus outbreak _ which has raised new fears among displaced residents who would normally pack into closely quartered emergency shelters and created new challenges for the agencies that operate them.
"No one is ready for it," Lloyd Broughton said of having to leave in the middle of a pandemic.
Another rapidly growing fire was burning in the mountains southwest of Silicon Valley, on the border of San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties. The CZU August Lightning Complex _ which consists of 22 fires _ has burned at least 10,000 acres and forced the evacuation of more than 22,000 people, officials said Wednesday.
Evacuations were ordered around Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Ano Nuevo State Park, Butano State Park and Pescadero Creek Park. Other evacuations included the area around Bonny Doon. Evacuations centers were set up at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds in Watsonville and at Pescadero High School.
At least 20 structures, likely single-family homes, have been destroyed, officials said during a Wednesday evening press conference. In San Mateo County, the CZU August Lightning Complex fire is threatening the communities of Pescadero and La Honda. In Santa Cruz County, structures have been lost in the Swanton Road area, and a Cal Fire station is being threatened by flames.
Firefighters expressed worry about the fire reaching the communities of Boulder Creek, Ben Lomond and Felton, located northwest of Santa Cruz, said Mark Brunton of Cal Fire. The weather conditions for the next three days are grim, Brunton said.
"That makes that threat very direct and very real," he said. "We're doing everything we possibly can to protect life and property."
On Tuesday, Newsom declared a statewide emergency in order to help California respond to the outbreak of fires.
Newsom's office said the state had secured assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to respond to fires in Napa, Nevada and Monterey counties.
"We are deploying every resource available to keep communities safe as California battles fires across the state during these extreme conditions," Newsom said. "California and its federal and local partners are working in lockstep to meet the challenge and remain vigilant in the face of continued dangerous weather conditions."
The rash of fires has also led to a spike in traffic to Cal Fire's website, overloading it and intermittently crashing it, officials said. Cal Fire personnel were working with their technology department Wednesday morning to try to handle the crush of visitors.
Another blaze, dubbed the Dolan fire, has grown to an estimated 2,500 acres and prompted evacuations in Monterey County near Big Sur.
As of Wednesday morning, the fire was "actively burning in all directions," according to Los Padres National Forest officials. Because of the fire, Highway 1 has been closed from Ragged Point in San Luis Obispo County to Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park in Monterey County, officials said.
The River fire, also in Monterey County, has burned through more than 4,000 acres in steep mountainous terrain south of Salinas and has already destroyed six structures and damaged two others, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. More than 1,500 structures remain threatened by the blaze, which has prompted mandatory evacuations.
The River fire was spreading to the north, fanned by downsloping winds and getting closer to homes on Las Palmas Parkway south of Salinas, said Greg Bertelli, the Cal Fire deputy incident commander. It was also spreading to the south.
Just south of the River fire is the Carmel fire, fanned by winds from the northwest pushing flames to the southeast, Bertelli said.
Another blaze, which authorities named the 3-4 fire, was reported Wednesday morning southwest of Red Bank Road in Tehama County and has already burned 1,000 acres, according to Cal Fire.
To the southwest, in Glenn County, the August Complex fire rapidly grew overnight into Wednesday morning, and is now at least 30,000 acres, threatening the tiny town of Elk Creek, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The August Complex fire, which consists of at least 35 blazes, was caused by lightning strikes on Sunday in the Mendocino National Forest.
The western section of Glenn County has been placed under a mandatory evacuation order. Smoke could be seen on Interstate 5 from Willows, the county seat of Glenn County, to Red Bluff, the county seat of Tehama County.
In Marin County, the 1,100-acre Woodward fire _ also caused by lightning _ was burning in the Point Reyes National Seashore west of Olema.
And in Fresno County, a firefighting helicopter crashed Wednesday morning while on a water-dropping mission for the 1,500-acre Hills fire, killing the pilot, according to Cal Fire.
The helicopter was privately owned and contracted with the state to help fight fires, and the crash sparked a brush fire that has grown to about 50 acres and is spreading toward the Hills fire, officials said.
Firefighters are battling flames amid a heat wave that began late last week and has set record-high temperatures across California. On Sunday, the mercury in Death Valley reached 130 degrees _ possible the highest temperature reading on Earth in almost 90 years.
Temperature records for the day were broken across California on Tuesday, with Woodland Hills hitting 112, breaking a record last set for Aug. 18 in 1949; Burbank reaching 109 degrees, shattering a record last set in 1986, when the mercury hit 100; and Santa Ana, which hit 106 degrees, breaking a record last set in 2010, when the high for the day was 95.
Death Valley also hit a record high for the date, reaching 126 degrees, breaking the high of 125 set in 2001.
Other spots that reached record temperatures for the day included Needles (118), Barstow (113), Paso Robles (111), Sacramento (109), Merced (107), Modesto (106), Anaheim (105), Gilroy (104), El Cajon (102), Long Beach (100), UCLA (97), Camarillo (95), Oxnard (90) and Newport Beach (87). Riverside hit 108, tying a record for the day last set in 1950.
