California Fires Updates: 50,000 Forced to Evacuate
Strong wind gusts fanned the flames of a wildfire in northern Los Angeles County on Thursday, forcing the evacuation of at least 50,000 people, the authorities said.
ByThomas Fuller, Neil Vigdor and Mihir Zaveri
Right Now
Pacific Gas & Electric said that it was investigating whether an equipment malfunction had caused the blaze.
50,000 people were evacuated in Los Angeles County.
A fire in the canyons north of Los Angeles on Thursday forced the evacuation as extreme winds drove flames into residential neighborhoods and threatened hundreds of homes.
The so-called Tick fire was one of at least four wildfires in the Los Angeles area. More than 500 firefighters and air tankers were deployed to beat back the flames of the Tick fire, the largest in the Los Angeles area. There were no injuries or deaths, the authorities said.
Kathryn Barger, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, said multiple homes had been destroyed in the fires.
“We cannot let our guard down,” Ms. Barger said at a news conference on Thursday night. “We’re going to fight this aggressively.”
The Tick fire alone burned 3,950 acres on Thursday afternoon, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
The fires were driven by Santa Ana winds that meteorologists said could continue through the weekend and into early next week.
The Los Angeles Unified School District said it would close all of its schools in the San Fernando Valley on Friday because of “air-quality and safety concerns from the fires.”
Although peak fire season is far from over in California there have been many fewer wild fires this year than in previous years. Fewer than 300 structures have burned in wildfires so far this year compared with more than 23,000 all of last year. And around 163,000 acres have burned this year, according to Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency, compared with 1.6 million acres in all of 2018.
The office of Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday night that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had agreed to reimburse some of the costs of fighting the Tick fire.
16,000 acres of Sonoma County were engulfed by the Kincade fire.
The Kincade fire had destroyed 49 structures and burned 16,000 acres in Sonoma County as of Thursday night, according to Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency.
About 1,300 firefighters were battling the blaze, which was about 5 percent contained.
Evacuation orders covered 2,000 people, according to the authorities in Sonoma County. Wind gusts blew the fire through forests, leaving firefighters with little opportunity to stop or slow down the walls of flames after the fire began on Wednesday night. Sonoma County was ravaged in 2017, when the Sonoma Complex fires killed 24 and burned more than 170 square miles.
The power was on at an IHOP in Napa, and it became a refuge for some who lacked it at home.
Barbara Tonsberg, 93, a former church organist and high school math teacher, was eating pancakes because there was not much to do with the electricity cut off at her home in nearby Angwin.
“Drying your hair doesn’t work too well without power,” Ms. Tonsberg said. “I’m tired of cold food, but there’s nothing you can do but deal with it.”
As she spoke, her son, Wayne, got a call on his cellphone. It was an automated message from PG&E. He was advised that the company could not predict when their power would return — and that it might go out again Saturday.
A utility is investigating whether an equipment malfunction contributed to the Kincade fire.
Hundreds of thousands of people across California were without power on Thursday as utilities tried to prevent their equipment from igniting wildfires.
Pacific Gas & Electric said that it was investigating whether its equipment had been involved in stoking the Kincade Fire. PG&E said it had become aware that a “transmission-level outage” occurred in the area around the time the fire began.
The Sonoma Valley is part of California’s Wine Country, and the fire was threatening wineries as it jumped a highway and continued moving west on Thursday morning. Employees at the deLorimier Winery in Geyserville were hopeful that it would escape damage, as it did in 2017, when the area was under a mandatory evacuation order for several days because of wildfires.
“We’re feeling hopeful that it’s blowing the other direction,” said Katie Ambrosi, the marketing director for Wilson Artisan Wineries, which owns deLorimier. Most of the winery’s grapes have already been harvested, she said.
Power companies brace Californians for further blackouts.
PG&E was also preparing to restore power by Friday to 179,000 customers whose power had been shut off.
But it also said that another, possibly larger round of blackouts could come over the weekend when hot, dry and windy conditions are expected to hit Northern California.
“We are preparing for a large-scale shut-off,” said Bill Johnson, PG&E Corporation’s chief executive officer. He said it could go on longer and would be on the scale of an episode earlierthis month that left two million people in the dark, some for days.
Southern California Edison was also beginning pre-emptive blackouts that it said could affect almost 400,000 rate payers. The actual number of people losing power is generally much higher because each residential customer represents a household.
Mr. Newsom criticized the utilities for their handling of wildfire prevention. Despite meetings throughout the year in preparation for wildfire season, he said, the utilities failed to meet requirements for communications, notification and collaboration ahead of the blackouts.
“I must confess, it is infuriating beyond words,” Mr. Newsom said Thursday at a news conference in Los Angeles. “They are not meeting those protocols. I don’t think they get it.”
Ivan Penn and Carol Pogash contributed reporting.
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