California Fires Live Updates: Getty Fire Rages as 405 Jams
Up and down the state, wildfires are driving residents from their homes. About 180,000 in Sonoma have been ordered to flee, and part of Napa is under a warning.
ByThomas Fuller and Tim Arango
Right Now
A new fire has prompted evacuations in West Los Angeles and consumed 500 acres.
Evacuations in West Los Angeles jam a major freeway.
A brush fire that broke out early Monday morning on the western side of Los Angeles quickly consumed 500 acres, created gridlock on the 405, the nation’s busiest highway, and resulted in mandatory evacuations.
The fire, known as the Getty Fire, forced officials to seal off main interchanges of the 405 by midmorning. Offramps through the Sepulveda Pass, near where the fire started, were closed.
The growing blaze caused the Los Angeles Unified School District, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, and many private schools to close before classes were to begin. The University of California, Los Angeles and Santa Monica College also canceled classes.
“This is a fire that quickly spread,” said Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles at a news conference shortly after 7 a.m. local time. “It is now over 500 acres, but we luckily had a lot of amazing heroes that were in our fire stations who rolled out immediately. We have over 500 firefighters that are on the line right now, in some of the most challenging topography of Los Angeles.”
He said at least five homes had been lost. Ralph M. Terrazas, the chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, said he expected that number to rise.
The Getty fire, which was reported to emergency responders at 1:34 a.m. in a 911 call, prompted an emergency declaration from Mr. Garcetti. Neighborhoods covered by mandatory evacuation orders include Brentwood, Mountaingate and West Los Angeles. In all, more than 10,000 residential and commercial structures are in the evacuation zones.
Brian Humphrey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department, said there were no reports of serious injuries or fatalities as of about 9 a.m. local time.
Among the evacuees was the Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James. “Had to emergency evacuate my house and I’ve been driving around with my family trying to get rooms,” he said in a Twitter message.
Firefighters scramble to protect a major art museum.
The Los Angeles Fire Department dispatched crews to protect the Getty Center, home to priceless artworks and a new exhibition of Edouard Manet’s paintings.
Capt. Erik Scott, a department spokesman, said the Getty Center, a billion-dollar complex in Los Angeles that houses an art museum with works by Rembrandt, van Gogh, Monet and Degas, was not immediately threatened by the blaze.
Peter Sanders, another spokesman for the department, said the center was surrounded by firefighters, as air tankers dropped red fire retardant on canyons to the west, ahead of the advancing fire, to create a barrier. “There’s no longer an imminent threat to the Getty Center,” he said.
‘It feels like an incremental apocalypse’
Coffey Park, the neighborhood in Santa Rosa that was almost entirely destroyed in the Wine Country fires of two years ago, has been rebuilt, a remarkable transformation from field of rubble to idyllic California subdivision.
But now with the front lines of the Kincade fire just several miles away residents live in a state of anxiety.
Samaz and Stefan Kiesbye moved back in August after an arduous and costly rebuild of their home.
A suitcase is packed and sits by the door. They have gathered their marriage certificate and a stack of other documents and packed two paintings that they cherish.
“It feels like an incremental apocalypse,” Mr. Kiesbye said. “You can’t really sleep because you are constantly getting up to read alerts. It’s so exhausting.”
When they fled in 2017 they only had minutes to gather their passport and some electronics. Everything they own is new — and now threatened again by fire.
“It’s a constant struggle of being vigilant,” Mr. Kiesbye said. “It slowly eats away at you.”
A neighbor left two days ago and put a sprinkler on his roof. It’s been spraying water since he left.
A few doors down another neighbor was in his driveway warily surveying the smoke in the sky. “I’m moving to a snow cave in Montana if this place burns again,” he said.
The fast-growing Kincade fire is nearly twice the size of San Francisco.
The Kincade fire in the heart of Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, has doubled in size in 24 hours and was only 5 percent contained on Monday morning. The fire has burned an area nearly twice the size of the city of San Francisco, which covers 47 square miles — and the fire still growing.
Nearly 100 buildings have been destroyed by the fire, and 16 more damaged, according to Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency. Some 3,400 firefighters were battling the blaze as of Sunday night, public safety officials said.
Cal Fire said firefighters were hoping for a brief reprieve on Monday from the high winds that have acted as a dangerous accelerant. But more high winds are in the forecast for Tuesday night into Wednesday.
The fire threatens 80,000 buildings across an expanding evacuation zone, which includes a warning, but not an order, for part of neighboring Napa County.
Two firefighters sustained burns, and one of them was airlifted to U.C. Davis Medical Center for treatment, the authorities said.
All 40 Sonoma County public school districts and 8 independent charter schools in the county have closed through Tuesday because of the uncertain availability of power, evacuations of students and staff, fire threats and air quality concerns, county officials announced.
Classes were also canceled at the University of California, Berkeley; California State University Maritime Academy in Vallejo; Dominican University of California in San Rafael; Santa Rosa Junior College; and Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park.
Maps: Kincade and Getty Fires, Evacuation Zones and Power Outages
Detailed maps show the current fire extents, power outage zones and areas under evacuation orders.
In the East Bay, the smell of smoke fills every room.
At my house 25 miles from San Francisco in the hills of the East Bay, I woke up this morning at 4:30, walked with a flashlight across a spaghetti tangle of extension cords in the hallway and slipped into the backyard to turn on the generator. Nothing works in the house without it. Across Northern California on Monday around two million people were out of power. Only some of us were lucky enough to have a fallback.
As the Kincade fire in Wine Country forced the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people over the weekend, residents farther south scrambled to find gasoline. My neighbors messaged each other about which roads were safe to take to avoid the half-dozen spot fires that ignited in our area. In the town adjacent to mine, Lafayette, a fire destroyed a sports facility and threatened a hillside neighborhood. Another fire near the Carquinez Bridge shut down an interstate. At one point on Sunday, four fires were burning simultaneously within 20 miles of my house.
On Monday morning the smell of smoke filled every room of my house.
The ferocious winds that propelled the fires bent saplings in half and knocked down mature trees, blocking a road near my house and injuring several people at a farmers’ market in nearby Martinez.
I’ve noticed that neighbors are using the word apocalyptic much more casually these days. The winds, which in some cases reached hurricane-level speeds, added to a feeling of chaos and powerlessness. At night, neighborhoods without power look eerily uninhabited.
We have taken for granted the convenience of flipping on a light switch or of checking email. In the bedroom communities of San Francisco and Silicon Valley the fires and blackouts have turned assumptions upside down. Pharmacies, supermarkets and restaurants are closed during the blackouts. On Sunday even the open space around us was closed — the regional park district announced it was off-limits because of extreme winds. We filled our bathtub after warnings that the water utility may need to shut down its pumps. One man said he had tried to go to six gas stations, all of them closed.
The extraordinary is becoming routine. Pacific Gas & Electric says it may shut off power again this week, starting on Tuesday when strong winds are expected to return.
PG&E braces 500,000 customers for the next power shutdown.
Pacific Gas and Electric officials said the company notified 500,000 customers in Northern California on Sunday that they might have their power shut off on Tuesday, affecting many of the same areas that were blacked out over the weekend.
In fact, some customers might not have their power restored from the weekend shut-offs before the next round takes effect, according to Andy Vesey, the chief executive of PG&E.
Mr. Vesey told reporters Sunday night that fire prevention was paramount. “We look for the highest-risk zones, where we have the potential for catastrophic wildfire,” he said. “We will not roll the dice when it comes to public safety.”
The next round of potential shut-offs, which could affect 32 counties throughout the state, were announced within hours of the power cuts imposed on Sunday that affected nearly 3 million people, the largest fire-prevention blackouts in California history.
The new round would be the fourth time this month that the company has intentionally turned off electricity to large numbers of customers, some of whom had power for only a few hours between earlier blackouts.
PG&E’s policy of pre-emptively cutting power in the hope of preventing its lines and equipment from causing fires — as has happened several times in recent years — has angered customers, regulators and politicians. Leaders in the Democratic-controlled State Senate have organized a panel to review PG&E’s actions.
Mr. Vesey said he had spoken to customers whose power had been shut off at a community resource center set up by the utility, and he acknowledged their discontent.
“You’re right — what we do is not popular,” Mr. Vesey said. “I will not tell you that people congratulated us. People are angry.”
The best scientific explanation: Bad trends plus bad luck
This increasingly awful fall fire season follows hard on the previous two, in 2017 and 2018, both of which were worse than any in recent memory. Some of the same regions, and people, are being affected repeatedly in quick succession. Psychic trauma is surely compounded significantly for these residents, not to mention the firefighters on the front lines.
How should California residents think about the future, when the present is, suddenly and persistently, not only far outside their prior experience, but also, in its scale and velocity at least, beyond what science had predicted?
It’s an increasingly common experience, occurring with other kinds of events as well. Heavy rain events are becoming heavier around the world, but known climate trends can’t explain the repeated 500-or-more-year floods that Houston has seen in the last few years.
In the case of the increasingly frequent wildfire disasters in California, I argued the other day that they have multiple causes: poor maintenance by PG&E, expanded human settlement at the margins of fire-prone woodlands, and global warming. But I don’t think any of them explains either the suddenness or the persistence of the change that Californians have experienced in the last three years.
When it comes to the weather, and the climate, my views here are strongly informed by discussions with my colleague Park Williams, an expert on wildfire and climate whose research is directly relevant. That research shows that the area burned by fires each year in the summer months has increased drastically, and this is consistent with the influence expected from global warming.
But, as explained by Dr. Williams in his recent research article, and in The Times on Friday, the headline-making fires of the last three years have all occurred in fall. In that season, temperature has a role, but other factors are likely to be more important — first and foremost, the dry Diablo and Santa Ana winds.
Those are mainly fall and winter phenomena, and clearly critical factors in the recent and current fires. But these winds are actually projected to occur frequently as the climate warms (with no clear trend yet apparent in the observations). So the fires may be attributable to weather, but the most critical aspect of the weather isn’t directly attributable to human activity — nor, as far as I can tell, to any other identifiable larger cause.
So what is going on?
My guess is that the best scientific answer goes something like this. The sparking might have gotten worse over time. But more important, in the last three years, it has encountered the hot, dry downslope winds markedly more often. And global warming is probably making those winds a little hotter, but the wind events themselves, the most important proximate causes, may well be only explainable, ultimately, as “natural variability.” That means they are inherently unpredictable. Bad luck, in other words. If this is true, it would suggest a decent chance that next year shouldn’t be as bad.
Or maybe the causes are in principle knowable, but current science just doesn’t know them. Maybe climate change is proceeding more rapidly and dangerously than we understand. But it’s good to understand what the limits of our knowledge are. That should keep us humble about our place on the earth.
Reporting was contributed by Neil Vigdor, Adeel Hassan, Vanessa Swales, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Ivan Penn, Jacey Fortin and Lauren Hepler.
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