More on the N California wildfires

Wildfires in Northern California Kill at Least 10 and Destroy 1,500 Buildings

Aerial photography shows what a neighborhood in Santa Rosa looked like before the 

Northern California firestorm. With at least 10 dead and 1,500 structures destroyed, it's 

already one of the worst fires in state history

NY Times,

9 October, 2017

SANTA ROSA, Calif. — Fast-moving wildfires raged across Northern California on Monday, killing at least 10 people, sending well over 100 to hospitals, forcing up to 20,000 to evacuate and destroying more than 1,500 buildings in one of the most destructive fire emergencies in the state’s history.

Firefighters were battling blazes in eight counties, officials said.

In Santa Rosa, the fire gutted a Hilton hotel and flattened the Journey’s End retirement community, a trailer park not far from the freeway that crosses the city. Most of the trailers were leveled, leaving a smoldering debris field of household appliances, filing cabinets and the charred personal effects of more than 100 residents. Pieces of ash fell like snowflakes, and a pall of white smoke across the city blotted out the sun.

Janet Upton, a deputy director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said that at least 15 separate fires across the region had destroyed more than 1,500 homes and businesses and burned about 94,000 acres since late Sunday night. At least 10 people had been killed as of Monday evening, she said: seven in Sonoma County, two in Napa County and one in Mendocino County.

The property damage, already among the worst seen in a fire in California, was expected to increase. In Santa Rosa, the seat of Sonoma County, the authorities imposed a curfew starting at sunset and said they were watching for looters.

Gov. Jerry Brown issued emergency proclamations for Butte, Lake, Mendocino, Napa, Nevada, Orange, Sonoma and Yuba Counties, saying the fires had damaged critical infrastructure and threatened thousands of homes. He also asked President Trump to declare a major disaster.

“This is really serious. It’s moving fast. The heat, the lack of humidity and the winds are all driving a very dangerous situation and making it worse,” the governor said at a morning news conference. “It’s not under control by any means. But we’re on it in the best way we know how.”

Hospitals in Napa and Sonoma Counties reported scores of patients with fire-related ailments. St. Joseph Health said it had treated about 170 people at three of its hospitals in the region — most of them for smoke inhalation, but some for burns. Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and Petaluma Valley Hospital postponed all elective procedures to free up resources for emergency care.

The fires began at about 10 p.m. Sunday and were fanned by wind gusts of more than 50 miles an hour, Ms. Upton said. The causes remained under investigation on Monday afternoon.

The worst fires in Northern California tend to hit in October, when dry conditions prime them to spread fast and far as heavy winds, known as north winds or diablo winds, buffet the region.

Ms. Upton said that conditions were critically dry, given the lack of moisture in the air and the buildup of grass, brush and trees.

“Combined, that’s a recipe for disaster,” she said.

Smoke billowed into the Bay Area, but the Marin County Fire Department reported that there were no separate fires there.

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aerial footage of the #NapaFire

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Reports suggested that residents had been caught unaware, many of them fleeing in cars and on foot as firefighters rushed to contain the outbreak. A number of roadways, including highways, were blocked by fire.

Parts of Santa Rosa were evacuated, according to the city manager, who said the Kaiser Permanente and Sutter hospitals were being cleared out. Marc Brown, a spokesman for Kaiser Permanente, said about 130 patients had been evacuated from the Santa Rosa medical center because of the fires.

But St. Joseph Health, another hospital system in the area, said in a statement Monday evening that its facilities were still open.

Flying cinders carried the fire across roads and ignited small patches through neighborhoods: A pile of wood chips in the Home Depot parking lot caught fire. Traffic lights at multiple intersections were not functioning, and columns of black smoke could be seen in the evergreen forests on the northern outskirts of the city.

The fires raged through the hills that are home to some of the country’s most prized vineyards. The main north-south highway that connects San Francisco to the northernmost parts of California was closed Monday as fire engulfed both sides of the freeway. Santa Rosa is a hub for tours into wine country, and at least two large hotels that cater to the wine tourism trade were destroyed by the fires.

North of Santa Rosa’s downtown, residents of the Overlook, a hilltop apartment complex, used fire extinguishers to put out flames engulfing cypress trees planted along a building. Minutes later, the flames returned. At least three engines and ladder trucks arrived but could not stop flames on one of the buildings from spreading to the roof.

“It looks like they’re giving up on that one,” said Derek Smith, a Santa Rosa resident watching the blaze whose house was several blocks away.

Belia Ramos, the chairwoman of the Napa County board of supervisors, said the county was dealing with three main fires. One has threatened more than 10,000 acres in northern Napa County, another has endangered 8,000 to 12,000 acres, and a third has affected about 2,000 acres, she said.

California was hit by fires throughout the summer. Late last month, several blazes led to the evacuation of about 1,000 people in Southern California. And on Monday, a brush fire in Anaheim burned at least seven homes.

“I’ve been with the department for 31 years, and some years are notorious,” Ms. Upton said, adding, “I’m afraid that 2017 is going to be added to that list now.”

Even into the early afternoon — many hours after the homes were destroyed in the Journey’s End retirement community in Santa Rosa — flames shot from a large propane tank with a roar that resembled an aircraft engine.

Richard Snyder and Robert Sparks, both residents of the retirement community, said their neighboring trailers had been incinerated. They lost televisions, books, laptops — and copies of the insurance policies they had taken out.

“This is all I have,” Mr. Snyder said, pointing to his jeans and turquoise T-shirt. “And one pair of glasses.”

The fire was so intense, it burned through the metal and glass trailers and safes that had been advertised as fireproof.

“It was locked,” Dana Walter, Mr. Sparks’s daughter, said of the safe. “Passports, ID cards, everything gone.”

Ofelia Razo, one of about a dozen residents whose houses were spared, fled with her purse in a pre-dawn evacuation with dozens of other residents. Her husband, Milton, took only his guitar.

When they returned about 10 hours later, Ms. Razo saw the smoking rubble in the distance and broke down.

But as she came closer, she saw that the fire had stopped at her wooden lattice fence. Her powder blue trailer was, bizarrely, untouched. Even the plastic flowers in a ceramic pumpkin vase on the porch were intact. Her red rose bushes were only lightly singed.

“It’s a miracle!” she said. “Gracias, Señor!”

Meanwhile in Colorado

California Firestorm: More than 1500 Structures Lost, Mass Evacuations from Napa to Anaheim

Wunderground,

9 October, 2017

Hot, dry winds across the length of California triggered one of the most destructive and widespread fire days in state history on Monday. At least one person was killed, at least 60 were injured, and at least 1500 homes and other structures were lost by midday in nine Northern California counties, reported SFGate.com. The destruction puts Monday’s fires into the top five most damaging wildfire events in in California history, according to Steve Bowen (Aon Benfield)

Figure 1. GOES-16 visible satellite image from 2:15 pm PDT Monday, October 9, 2017, showing plumes from the Northern California fires (center) being blown westward (downslope) across parts of the northern Bay Area and into the Pacific. At bottom is a smaller plume from the Anaheim Hills fire southeast of Los Angeles. Image credit: RAMMB/CIRA @ CSU. GOES-16 images are considered preliminary and non-operational.

The fires kicked off Sunday night as strong easterly winds (called “diablo” winds in Northern California, after Mt. Diablo) pushed hot, dry air across the California wine country. On Monday, the easterlies began to weaken in the Bay Area, while they intensified southward into the LA-San Diego area, where they’re known as Santa Ana winds (after the Santa Ana mountain range). By Monday afternoon, some 1000 homes were threatened in the Anaheim Hills neighborhood of eastern Anaheim, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“Emergency dispatch centers in the Bay Area were being overwhelmed by 911 calls,” said SFGate.com. “Officials urged people to only call 911 for active, unattended flames or life-threatening emergencies.” There was little to no containment of the largest fires at midday.Some 57,000 acres had burned by midday in Northern California, and an estimated 20,000-plus Californians have been forced to evacuate ahead of the flames. The evacuation zones include large parts of the city of Santa Rosa.

 

Figure 2. Flame from an open gas valve burns at the Journey's End mobile home park on Monday, Oct. 9, 2017, in Santa Rosa, Calif. Wildfires whipped by powerful winds swept through Northern California, sending residents on a headlong flight to safety through smoke and flames as homes burned. Image credit: AP Photo/Ben Margot.

Figure 2. A schematic showing winds forced upward against a mountain range, which produces cooling and can lead to rain or snow, followed by descent on the lee slope, which leads to compressional warming and lower relative humidity. Image credit: UCAR/COMET Program.

Downslope winds in autumn a classic pattern for California fire

Many of the worst fires in and near the coastal ranges of California occur in early autumn. Of the ten most destructive California fires on record prior to this year, seven occurred in either September or October. The reason: proximity to the cool Pacific Ocean gives the region a Mediterranean climate, meaning that winters tend to be mild and wet and summers hot and dry. Last winter, the rain and mountain snows were far more generous than average, after years of drought. The moist winter fostered lush growth that later dried out in the intense heat of summer. Munich Re meteorologist Mark Bove tweetedthat this year’s sequence was a “perfect setup for [a] bad California wildfire season.”

Strong fronts that sweep across the western U.S. in early fall often include a low-level dome of high pressure that pushes flow westward. Monday’s strong high was centered over the Rocky Mountains, where heavy autumn snows have pummeled the Colorado Front Range. As the winds around this high flowed over California’s coastal mountains and down the west slopes, the air heated up and the relative humidity dropped. Winds gusted as high as 75 mph on Monday atop South Mountain, above the town of Santa Paula in Ventura County. In Santa Ana, CA, the temperature at 2 pm PDT Monday was 87°F, with a relative humidity of 8%.

The pressure contrast driving the strong winds will decrease from north to south on Monday night, and a cooler-than-average air mass will sweep into the region from Tuesday through the rest of the week. Both of these trends will be a great boon to the ongoing firefighting efforts, although much damage has already been done and the disaster was still unfolding at midday Monday.

Figure 3. The Air Quality Index was in the “unhealthy” range (red) across parts of the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas at noon PDT Monday, October 9, 2017. Image credit: EPA/AirNOW.

Dangerous air quality in parts of Bay Area, SoCal

Smoke and soot from the fires blew across the Bay Area in the pre-dawn hours, leading to a reddened sunrise and degraded air quality in San Francisco and nearby cities. By midday Monday, pockets of dangerous air quality were scattered in and near ongoing fires in both Northern and Southern California. A smoke advisory was issued by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, advising residents to limit outdoor activities to avoid unnecessary exposure if smoke is smelled, and to set air conditioning units and car vent systems to re-circulate to prevent outside air from moving inside. The South Coast Air Quality Management District issued a more localized smoke advisory for parts of Orange and Riverside counties in connection with the Anaheim Hills fire.

Smoke from the ongoing fires will continue to pose local air quality issues as long as the fires rage. In the coming days, the smoke might have some impact on air quality further afield as it gets mixed into the large-scale flow from California eastward

We’ll be back with our next tropical update on Tuesday. Our Monday morning post covered newborn Tropical Storm Ophelia, which is gradually strengthening in the Central Atlantic, as well as the damage left by ex-Hurricane Nate.