http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-napa-fires-20171009-story.html
The disasters just keep on coming. I hope everyone on CC in that area is okay.
So many different hotspots that just sprang up overnight, on a windy night.
I have a friend in Orange, and soot is falling in her yard from a fire there, so far from these. So scary.
Yes, a fire is burning homes in Anaheim right now. The wind is just so fierce. The smoke is drifting for miles.
Last I heard, a few minutes ago, the fires in the wine country are 0% contained. It’s the fire season here in California, everything’s dry, and last night there were gusts of wind up to 80 mph. Under those conditions a flame somewhere can soon be a firestorm somewhere else. It’s horrible up in the North Bay. My heart goes out to all affected.
The scary thing for me is looking at where the houses are that have been incinerated: not up in inaccessible mountains. Santa Rosa is a flat suburb. I live in a flat suburb in Silicon Valley. If it can burn there, it can burn here. Gulp.
I have family in Napa and Santa Rosa. This is very unsettling. We’ve experienced wildfires. Our lake house was threatened when wildfires decimated our neighborhood. Our house survived, but the neighborhood was never the same, and for years, drought conditions kept the area at risk. I was always a bit on edge whenever there were red flag conditions.
Hoping the humidity increases, or even better, rain falls in the area.
The Hilton Santa Rosa burned, some guests running out barefoot barely dressed.
The golf course where there was just a PGA tournament (which might have been on TV) burned, the tents were still up and burned.
2 hospitals evacuated.
Yeah, the hits keep coming.
My brother (Santa Rosa) can’t get back to his house until tomorrow, but based on someone’s posting about his neighborhood he said it seems to describe his home as one of just a few still standing. His inlaws’ house (one mile away) is definitely gone.
This makes me so painfully sad.
We were in the area just a few weeks ago, as we occasionally go wine touring when Mr. comes to Bay Area on business… this is such a lovely place, one of my favorites. So so sad. I have no words. Hope the death toll does not grow. Property can be replaced. Human lives are irreplaceable.
My son’s friend plays baseball at Napa Valley College. They evacuated to his roommates home a couple hours away earlier today. Last we heard the college was being used as a shelter.
A big blow to the wine industry:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-fi-wine-fire-20171009-story.html
“The Paradise Ridge winery sustained extensive damage, as flames raced through Sonoma’s Kenwood and Glen Ellen wine districts, while in Napa, they tore through the Stags Leap district of Napa, threatening some of the best-known winery facilities in the region.”
My favorite of Mr R’s cousins live in Daly City. Quite worried but they’re fine. She said they can smell the fire but they’re not in danger.
The pictures are absolutely heartbreaking. I’m so sorry to everyone out there.
Please stay safe if anyone is in the path.
Daly City is in the South Bay, just south of San Francisco. These terrible fires are in the North Bay. The San Francisco Bay is between the North Bay and the South Bay; they’re on opposite sides of the Golden Gate.
There are some reports that Stag’s Leap has burned to the ground. Paradise Ridge Winery is destroyed. This could be devastating for the people who earn their livelihood by making awesome CA wine… there are still grapes to be harvested, and even if they have not burned, smoke and ashes might have made them unusable for wine making.
Ok this says some buildings at Stag’s Leap have burned.
I have several friends in the Napa - Sonoma area. All have reported that they are safe, but several have not been able to get into to see if there are homes are still there. Two in particular, are very close to areas with many homes destroyed. I can’t even imagine how brutal the waiting is.
The combination of the wet winter producing lots of grasses followed by a hot dry summer and a windy, exceedingly low humidity day is deadly in California…Same scenario as the Oakland Hills fire several years ago.
@“Cardinal Fang” thanks for that. I looked at it on the map but I have a really hard time with trying to visualize how far away something is.
As someone who doesn’t live in fire-prone country, I’m ignorant. Is there anything that can possibly be done to prevent these?
Not much one can do. Keep vegetation away from the house, mow grass before it becomes a fire hazard and pray that your neighbors do the same and no one starts a fire accidentally or deliberately. WA and BC Canada have been burned and smoked pretty badly this summer. Now the CA Wine Country.
They don’t know what caused the initial little fire, so maybe that could have been prevented. But California has a long dry season. October is fire season. Fires happen. Climate change is making fires worse here, just as it’s making hurricanes worse.
There are ways to make your house less likely to burn, but it doesn’t look to me like any of them would have made any difference in Santa Rosa. In the neighborhood that burned, every house was incinerated to ash.
Lightening causes a lot of wildfires in Eastern WA… no way to prevent that.