In Fire-Scarred California, ‘If You’re Told to Go, You Go’
As wildfires raged across the state this week, tens of thousands of residents were ordered to evacuate their homes out of an abundance of caution.
Firefighters worked to extinguish a house on fire in Santa Clarita, Calif., on Friday.Allison Zaucha for The New York Times
ByTim Arango and Thomas Fuller
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — The blaring sirens came around midnight accompanied by the emphatic voices of police officers on loudspeakers ordering all residents to evacuate from their homes in the canyons north of Los Angeles.
Cindy and Frank Cruz were not sure there was an immediate threat to their home, but they and many others did not hesitate to flee.
“People aren’t taking any chances,” said Ms. Cruz, who is seven months pregnant and who spent the night in the couple’s car in the parking lot of a Denny’s. They were among 50,000 people ordered to leave their homes.
The trauma of catastrophic fires over the past two years has scarred California, which has seen more than 1,300 wildfires ignite over the past two weeks alone.
With the Paradise Fire in Northern California claiming more than 80 lives last year, and the Woolsey Fire tearing a destructive path through Malibu and its surroundings, this year everyone — power companies, fire and law enforcement agencies, residents — is extra cautious.
“It’s the reality of the conditions we are facing that we absolutely can’t underestimate the potential of how quickly these fires can get into communities,” said Ken Pimlott, a career firefighter who until last year was the head of California’s largest firefighting agency, Cal Fire. “Everybody wants to take these conditions very seriously.”
On Friday, fires in Santa Clarita stretched across 4,300 acres, had destroyed at least six homes and were 5 percent contained. In Northern California, firefighters continued to battle the Kincade blaze, which has burned more than 20,000 acres and persists even as residents prepared for another widespread blackout that the state’s largest utility hopes will prevent the start of more fires. The shut-off will affect 850,000 customers of Pacific Gas and Electric in anticipation of what the utility says will be some of the most dangerous conditions this year.
There are always people who refuse to evacuate as wildfires bear down on their communities, firefighters and sheriff’s deputies say, but many residents appear to have resigned themselves to a new reality in California of a constant state of readiness for the next disaster.
In vulnerable areas, residents keep gasoline tanks filled, sniff the dry, autumn air for smoke and look warily at the parched, wind-swept hills for any signs of ignition.
“I think people are listening more,” said Mary Lindsey, 64, who on Friday morning was eating breakfast at a Red Cross center in a gymnasium at the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita. She and her husband evacuated their home on Thursday.
“In the past there’d be evacuation orders and people would blow them off. After last year, they aren’t doing that.”
When they got word of the fire on Thursday, Ms. Lindsey said, her neighbors packed their belongings in their cars and waited for orders to leave.
The fire, which ignited in a canyon above Santa Clarita on Thursday, exploded to thousands of acres within hours.
Ms. Lindsey’s husband, Charles, said the fire, known as the Tick Fire, started near their home and moved quickly through scrubland.
“With the winds blowing, it moved fast,” said Mr. Lindsey, 68, his dog Ivy at his feet. “In the middle of the night, if you’re told to go, you go.”
Two shelters housed evacuees, according to Roxanne Schorbach, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross. Roughly 400 people spent Thursday night on cots in a college gymnasium, many with their pets; on Friday morning they ate pancakes and bagels while eagerly awaiting news.
By late morning there were no active fires in the Santa Clarita Hills, just the smoldering remnants of blazes that died down with the winds. But the authorities were allowing only some of the tens of thousands who evacuated back into their homes, fearing that winds might rekindle the fires.
A drive through the evacuation zone in Santa Clarita showed block after block of well-appointed homes, an idyllic tableau of California suburbia, mostly untouched by fire, even as the surrounding hillsides were charred and bruised. A few residents who stayed behind rode around on bikes, or shuffled by with gas cans for generators.
A husk of one white-painted house stood smoking surrounded by perfectly intact homes. The street was choked with TV news vans but otherwise eerily empty.
Two thousand people were also evacuated in Northern California as the Kincade Fire advanced, destroying around 50 structures.
Mr. Pimlott, the former Cal Fire chief, says the authorities are right to be aggressive in their evacuation plans. Fires are moving faster than in the past, he said, often leaving people without enough time to react. The Camp Fire last year swept through the town of Paradise in the morning hours, killing many people who never made it out of their homes.
“Once a fire hits a community it’s too late,” he said.
PG&E says it will carry out its deliberate power shut-off starting Saturday evening, the third time in two weeks that the company will have turned off power to large areas of Northern California.
The blackouts, which earlier in the month left more than 2 million people in the dark, are designed to prevent the possibility that electrical lines will spark future fires during windstorms. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who toured parts of Sonoma on Friday and declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles and Sonoma Counties, said the state would deploy $75 million to help local governments stay operational during the blackouts.
Yet despite an ethos of caution toward the fire threat, there were signs that the Kincade Fire may have been started by electrical equipment that PG&E decided not to shut down. The company turned off the power to 200,000 customers this week but did not cut power to a transmission line that the company said malfunctioned just before the fire started.
Bill Johnson, PG&E Corporation’s chief executive, said at a news conference on Thursday night that based on the utility’s analysis, the wind forecast did not warrant cutting power to the transmission lines in the area of the Kincade Fire.
Among the many families that fled the fire were Adalberto and Irma Silva, who left their home in the wine-growing town of Geyserville on Thursday after the police went door to door ordering evacuations.
“The whole town is empty,” said Mr. Silva, who has worked in nearby vineyards since he left the Mexican state of Michoacán in 1981.
The couple has lived with their now-grown children in the quiet enclave near the Russian River for 11 years, an area that sees threats both from fires and floods.
“When it’s not water, it’s fire,” Ms. Silva said.
Ivan Penn in Burbank, Calif., and Lauren Hepler in Healdsburg, Calif., contributed reporting.
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