A dangerous wildfire that broke out early Monday in Los Angeles was threatening hundreds of homes near the world-famous Getty Center. Strong winds were spreading the fast-growing fire that was burning along a major freeway west of downtown.
Fire Chief Ralph Terrazas told reporters firefighters were overwhelmed. “They had to make some tough decisions on which houses they were able to protect,” Terrazas said. “Many times it depends upon where the ember lands.”
In Northern California, improving conditions could help crews gain ground on wildfires that have forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate. Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Essick told reporters Monday morning that authorities weren’t yet allowing people to reenter areas burned by the so-called Kincade Fire, the state’s largest.
In Los Angeles, the fire department said the Getty Fire burned over 600 acres. Several neighborhoods were under evacuation orders, and at least eight homes were destroyed, Mayor Eric Garcetti said.
A video posted on social media by a motorist shows one side of Highway 405 was turned into a towering inferno, CBS News correspondent Carter Evans reports. Fire officials called it a dynamic situation.
The flames were being fanned by high winds, which seemed to have calmed down a little before dawn, Evans reports. One of those displaced from his home by the several fires burning near Los Angeles was Lakers star LeBron James.
He tweeted Monday morning he had to evacuate his home suddenly and was driving around trying to find a place to go with his family. He followed up later saying he finally found a safe place.
Senator Kamala Harris also said that her family in California has evacuated due to the wildfires.
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A potentially toxic chemical that has run off former military bases and manufacturing sites to contaminate drinking water in parts of suburban Philadelphia and South Jersey has shown up in a Camden County borough’s water supply.
Bellmawr Borough ordered one of its two water treatment facilities shut down Thursday, three weeks after the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection notified the borough of the contamination. It marked one of the first times New Jersey’s newly established drinking-water standard for a chemical known as PFNA set off alarm bells for a municipal water authority.
The testing measured PFNA at an average level higher than the state’s limit by about 6 parts per trillion, the borough said in a letter to residents. The borough has a population of about 11,500.
At that low level, the water was still safe to drink, the DEP told Bellmawr, the borough said in a statement. The contamination does not pose a health emergency for residents.
Local officials must bring the water system into compliance with the state standard within a year, but “in an absolute abundance of caution,” the borough decided to immediately shut down the contaminated water supply.
The chemical is a type of PFAS, a large family of substances that have been linked to cancer and other health problems and have been found in the drinking water of millions of Americans. It cannot be boiled out of water and requires costly treatment systems to remove.
This year, New Jersey became the first state in the country to set a drinking-water standard for one of the PFAS chemicals with its 13-part-per-trillion limit on PFNA. New Jersey plans to regulate two other types; Pennsylvania and a handful of other states are working on their own standards.
Embers fly across a road as the Kincade Fire sweeps through the community of JImstown in Sonoma County AP Photo by Noah Berger
By Courtney Teague, Lea Donosky, Derek Hawkins and Kayla Epstein for the Washington Post– Oct. 27, 2019, at 4:10 p.m. EDT
California’s governor declared a statewide emergency Sunday as wind-fueled fires spread across Sonoma County and prompted mass evacuations.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) pledged to deploy “every resource available” as authorities fought blazes on both ends of the state and weather conditions threatened to exacerbate fire threats.
In Sonoma, one of the largest evacuations in the county’s history was underway as ferocious winds and dry air fueled a wildfire that has raged in the region for days. The county sheriff’s office estimated that 180,000 people had been ordered to flee the Kincade Fire, which has spread to 30,000 acres and was only 10 percent contained. Officials rapidly expanded the number of areas under mandatory evacuation orders in the early hours of the morning as gusts as high as 93 mph swept through the hills and valleys north of the San Francisco Bay area.
The fires outside of Healdsburg, Calif., appeared to rapidly intensify overnight, according to the National Weather Service, turning State Route 128 into a hellish gauntlet and consuming the local Soda Rock Winery, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Kincade Fire consumes a car in Jimstown in Sonoma County. Noah Berger AP photo
In a flurry of predawn alerts, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office told residents in the northern portion of Santa Rosa, as well as areas southwest and northeast of the city, to evacuate immediately. About 200 patients were evacuated from two medical centers in the area, Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital, and relocated to safer facilities, according to hospital and local fire officials.
Patricia Blanchard said she lost power Saturday night around 8 p.m. Saturday in her small town of Monte Rio. The outage was soon followed by a visit from a Sonoma County deputy who ordered her to leave immediately. She left her ID and credit cards behind in the rush.
The fires outside of Healdsburg, Calif., appeared to rapidly intensify overnight, according to the National Weather Service, turning State Route 128 into a hellish gauntlet and consuming the local Soda Rock Winery, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
In a flurry of predawn alerts, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office told residents in the northern portion of Santa Rosa, as well as areas southwest and northeast of the city, to evacuate immediately. About 200 patients were evacuated from two medical centers in the area, Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital, and relocated to safer facilities, according to hospital and local fire officials.
Patricia Blanchard said she lost power Saturday night around 8 p.m. Saturday in her small town of Monte Rio. The outage was soon followed by a visit from a Sonoma County deputy who ordered her to leave immediately. She left her ID and credit cards behind in the rush.
The Soda Rock Winery erupts in flame as the Kincade Fire continues to burn in Healdsburg, Calif., on Sunday, October 27, 2019.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle
8:59 a.m. Lanes closed on northbound U.S. 101 in Brisbane, avoid area: Two lanes of northbound 101 near Tunnel Avenue remain closed due to a fire near the roadway, according to CHP spokesman Mark Andrews. All northbound lanes were shut down for half an hour shortly after 8 a.m. because of heavy smoke. Southbound lanes were not affected. Traffic is expected to remain slow. San Francisco Department of Emergency Management instructed people to avoid the area.
8:51 a.m. Winds to remain strong through Monday: The National Weather Service released a wind forecast showing winds are expected to remain “very gusty,” especially in the North Bay.
8:43 a.m. Evacuation orders lifted for Oakley fires: Firefighters have stopped forward progress on the Summer Lake and Knightsen Avenue and Delta Road fires in Oakley and are working to contain them, according to Contra Costa County fire officials. Residents who were placed under evacuation earlier Sunday morning were free to return home as of 8:30 a.m.
8:39 a.m. Fire reported near Candlestick Point: The San Francisco Fire Department is responding to a wildland fire near southbound U.S. 101 and Tunnel Avenue, fire officials said. No structures were immediately threatened. Traffic delays are expected.1.00
8:36 a.m. Nearly 1.5 million people in in Bay Area without power: PG&E confirmed it had completed shutoffs for 446,956 homes and businesses in all Bay Area counties (San Francisco was spared). The utility company hopes to begin the power restoration process as early as Monday, a spokesperson said. For full coverage of the outages, click here.
8:35 a.m. Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa under evacuation: The hospital has safely transferred 110 patients to other Kaiser hospitals in Northern California after being placed under a mandatory evacuation at 4:30 a.m., according to a hospital spokesperson. The hospital had already begun a “controlled transfer” of patients at 10:30 p.m. Saturday as a precautionary measure. Kaiser hospitals in San Rafael and Vallejo have lost power due to the PG&E blackout, but remain fully operational on emergency power.
8:21 a.m. Mines Fire in Alameda County mostly contained: The Mines Fire off Mines Rd and Del Valle Rd southeast of Livermore, is 35 acres and 98% contained, according to Cal Fire.
8:17 a.m. Winds may have peaked: The National Weather Service said that winds will “start to reduce compared to the peak experienced in the last few hours, but remain strong today with a ramp up tonight. Winds will really ease Monday morning and into the afternoon. Smoke that drifts to the Bay Area can add haze and reduce air quality.”
8:02 a.m. Evacuations ordered in East Bay Clayton fire: Evacuations have been ordered for Leon Court, Leon Drive and Leon Way. “Residents should leave immediately,” Contra Costa fire officials said.
7:48 a.m. ‘Largest’ evacuation in memory, 180,000 forced to flee: The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office says the evacuation orders for 180,000 people affected by the Kincade Fire is the “largest that any of us at the Sheriff’s Office can remember.”
7:42 a.m. Evacuation centers available for those fleeing Kincade fire: People can seek shelter at one of four evacuation centers, according to Cal Fire. They are: Santa Rosa Fairgrounds (1350 Bennett Valley Road), Sonoma Marin Fairgrounds (175 Fairgrounds Road, Petaluma), Santa Rosa Veterans Memorial Building (1351 Maple Avenue) and Petaluma Veterans Center (1094 Petaluma Blvd).
7:40 a.m. Gas stations may be running short: Thousands of cars rolled south down Highway 101 near Santa Rosa early Sunday morning, following widespread evacuation orders. At a Shell station just off Highway 101 and Steele Lane, an employee said the station was nearly out of gas and wouldn’t be getting any more in until while there was still a danger of fire.
7:25 a.m. Peak wind gusts hit 93, 87 mph: The National Weather Service released information about peak overnight gusts across the Bay Area. The strongest recorded wind was 93 mph in the Healdsburg Hills north, followed by 87 mph at Mt. Saint Helena.
Fierce winds and dry air whipped across northern California early Sunday, worsening the wildfires that have raged in the state for days and prompting state officials to issue new mandatory evacuation orders, including for part of the city of Santa Rosa.
In a flurry of early morning alerts, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office told residents in the northern portion of Santa Rosa, as well as areas southwest and northeast of the city, to evacuate immediately.
The sheriff’s office also issued a dire alert telling residents farther north of Santa Rosa to leave.
“The wind is really starting to pick up, as is the fire activity. If you are still in this mandatory evacuation area you need to leave now while you still can,” the sheriff’s office said.
The new orders dramatically expand the number of residents who will have to flee the growing fires and could further tax emergency workers tasked with helping them seek safety. Roughly 175,000 people live in Santa Rosa, and many of those residents may join the 90,000 people in Sonoma County who were already ordered to leave their homes Saturday night.
A windstorm was expected to pummel the region throughout the morning, creating historic fire weather conditions, according to the National Weather Service.
A hillside smolders as firefighters light backfires to slow the spread of the Kincade Fire in unincorporated Sonoma County, Calif., near Geyservillle on Saturday. (Noah Berger/AP)
Gusts as high as 80 mph swept through the hills and valleys north of the San Francisco Bay area and could continue until at least the early afternoon. An “extremely critical” fire weather area, the National Weather Service’s highest category, was in effect in several counties north of San Francisco.
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Last year, it was the Camp fire, the most destructive in California history, that left 86 dead and more than 13,900 homes destroyed, along with much of the town of Paradise.
Powerful downslope winds heading from the northeast to the southwest fanned all three firestorms. Forecasters now say these winds that will hit Northern California this weekend could bring one of the most potentially dangerous periods of fire weather experienced by the region in a generation.
That danger has prompted Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to plan to shut off power to millions, a relatively new and controversial strategy aimed at reducing the risk of fires triggered by electrical lines like the ones that caused the wine country and Paradise infernos. Also Saturday, about 90,000 more Sonoma County residents, from Healdsburg to Bodega Bay and the Pacific Coast, were ordered to evacuate.
The duration of the extreme wind event, known in the Bay Area as Diablo winds, is forecast to be roughly 36 hours, from Saturday evening around 8 p.m. into Monday morning, with isolated gusts of 65 mph to 80 mph in the highest peaks in the North Bay.
Weather forecasters hope that no sparks will ignite major destructive wildfires, but the potential for swift-moving wildfires is high.
“This is definitely an event that we’re calling historic and extreme,” said David King, meteorologist for the National Weather Service’s Monterey office, which manages forecasts for the Bay Area. “What really sets this apart from 1991 and 2017 is the time that these winds are going to continue gusting above 35 miles an hour…. The fact that this is going from Saturday night all the way to Monday morning, that’s what is really making this historic.”
Not only will winds be bad, but the air will be quite dry — relative humidity levels are forecast to fall between 15% and 30%; anything in the teens and 20s is really dry, King said. _______________________________________________________________________
The Fire Weather Watch has been upgraded to a Red Flag Warning for the N/E Bay (8 PM Sat-11 AM Mon), SF Peninsula Coast and Santa Cruz Mountains (3 AM Sun-11 AM Mon). Confidence is high for dangerously strong offshore winds and critically low RH. #CAwx#CAfire
“It’s certainly going to be a potentially very dangerous situation,” said Jan Null, adjunct professor of meteorology at San Jose State. “We are at the driest time of the year — if a fire starts with this dry, very strong wind pattern, the spread is extremely rapid.”
Temperatures are forecast to drop from midweek levels, which reached the 90s as the Kincade fire burned out of control on the northern edge of Sonoma County, destroying dozens of structures; in the North Bay, highs were forecast to fall into the 80s on Saturday and the 70s on Sunday, said weather service meteorologist Anna Schneider. But the falling temperatures won’t make much difference; the hot weather this week just dried out vegetation even more.
The area of highest risk includes the San Francisco Bay Area and points north, among them the northern Sierra Nevada and California’s North Coast region, including such cities as Eureka, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. It’s been particularly unusual that the North Coast has been so dry at this point in the fall, Swain said.
“This is the kind of event that makes me personally nervous, as somebody who has friends and family living in the fire zones in the Bay Area, and I don’t say that about all the events,” Swain said. “Hopefully, we get lucky and there are no major ignitions. But if they happen, it’s going to be really hairy Saturday night and Sunday. It’s looking really, really extreme.”
The winds are perhaps strong enough to cause some wind damage, perhaps even in some of the lower elevation regions, Swain said. Though it’s not unusual to see strong gusty winds in the hills and river canyons in Northern California in the autumn, this one is unusual for blowing strong winds in places where a lot more people live: in valleys and near the coast, Swain said.
“These winds are going to be much more widespread, certainly than during previous events this autumn, but also more widespread than is typical during offshore wind events,” Swain said.
Peak fire season is far from over in California. The Tick Fire and the Kincade Fire are among several blazes in the state, forcing thousands of evacuations. Credit…Allison Zaucha for The New York Times
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A fire that forced the evacuation of 50,000 people spread through canyons north of Los Angeles on Friday, jumping a freeway and threatening thousands of homes.
Like the Kincade Fire, a blaze raging through the forests and vineyards of Northern California, the Tick Fire in Santa Clarita was driven by strong autumn winds.
The authorities ordered all public schools in the Santa Clarita and San Fernando Valleys to be closed on Friday, and the closing of a major freeway snarled rush-hour traffic.
Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles and Sonoma Counties.
At a news briefing Friday morning, the authorities said the Tick Fire had burned 4,300 acres and was 5 percent contained. They said they had determined that six structures had burned so far.
“However, we know that it’s going to rise today,” said Chief Daryl L. Osby, of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
He said that there were actually no active fires at the moment, but that the ground was smoldering and the winds were whipping — they are dealing with “significant and erratic winds.” The worry is that new fires could ignite at any moment.
“At any moment an ember could get out of our containment line,” he said.
Still, he said the authorities would consider repopulating certain areas by Friday afternoon. Aircraft have been used to fight the Tick Fire, and 600 firefighters have been deployed, he said.
Chief Osby said he was pleased to see so many residents heed the evacuation orders, saying many did so because of memories of last season’s deadly fires. But he said he was concerned that some chose to ignore the orders, and were staying in their homes within the evacuation zones.
Dangerous winds are forecast to continue on Friday in the Los Angeles area, challenging the hundreds of firefighters deployed to contain the Tick Fire, the National Weather Service said.
Winds in the mountains will have gusts between 50 and 60 miles per hour and relative humidity will remain in the single digits, said Curt Kaplan, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service who covers the Los Angeles area.
“That’s going to cause extreme fire behavior with rapid rate of spread,” Mr. Kaplan said.
Although the winds are set to subside on Friday evening, they are forecast to return on Sunday.
“The combination of very dry conditions with strong winds and dry fuels — it’s just not a good combination,” Mr. Kaplan said.
Firefighters continued to battle the Kincade Fire early Friday morning in Geyserville, Calif. Credit…Max Whittaker for The New York Times
