Even an evacuation center in Sonoma County had to be evacuated.
Two years after the devastating Tubbs Fire killed 22 people in the region, officials were taking no chances with the menacing Kincade Fire and the threat of high winds that could spread flames overnight. County officials ordered the evacuation of nearly 90,000 people Saturday, and Pacific Gas and Electric announced it would shut off power for almost 1 million customers in Northern California.
“The next 72 hours are going to be challenging,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a news conference Saturday afternoon. “I could sugarcoat it but I’m not. We’re in an anticipatory stage that is rather anxiety-inducing.”
State fire officials hoped that by preparing for the worst-case scenario, they could avoid major destruction from the Kincade Fire, which had already consumed nearly 26,000 acres and was 10% contained as of 6:30 p.m. local time, according to Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency. The fire has so far destroyed 77 structures, including 31 homes, and damaged another 14 structures, the authorities said.
The original evacuation order covering 50,000 people was expanded as far west as the Pacific Ocean by nightfall.
Public safety officials urged members of the public to comply with the order, saying that failing to do so would put them as well as emergency responders at risk.
“I’m seeing people reporting that they’re going to stay and fight this fire,” Mark Essick, the Sonoma County sheriff, said during a news conference Saturday night. “Fire is not something you can stay and fight.”
PG&E; said that it would begin cutting power to 940,000 homes and businesses — which could affect as many as 2.7 million people — Saturday afternoon and that residents should plan to spend at least two days without electricity. Emergency responders warned residents of Marin County — which includes Sausalito, San Rafael, Tiburon and Novato — that power restoration could take up to five days.
“People are acting crazy,” said Ryan Marshall, 19, who was driving from Windsor to San Jose with a golden retriever, a golden lab and a pet California kingsnake. “It’s just another manic escape like the one that happened two years ago.”
Beverlee Sagon and Jerry Brendlin, who were evacuating to Reno, Nevada, with friends Saturday, still freeze when they see a firetruck with its lights on. Two years ago they had to flee their home just north of Santa Rosa in the middle of the night.
“We had planned to stay up all night tonight just taking turns sleeping because it was so scary waking up out of a dead sleep,” said Sagon, 64, whose house survived the Tubbs Fire.
Not everyone was eager to flee. Michael and Deborah Bailey were hunkering down in their house among the county’s vineyards, defying the evacuation order and preparing for their second blackout this week by powering up a generator and figuring out where to send their horses.
Like many Californians, they were frustrated to lose power, again.
“They just turned it on yesterday afternoon around 4, and now they’re going to turn it off again,” Bailey, 72, said of PG&E.; “We’ve been madly running around filling up bathtubs with water.”
The Kincade blaze, which started Wednesday, has been fueled by the steep topography of the densely forested area. It forced 2,000 people to evacuate earlier in the week.
Winds were forecast to reach 80 mph and were expected to pick up Saturday evening, with some of the strongest blowing through between 3 a.m. and 10 a.m. Sunday. The National Weather Service issued a red-flag warning through Monday morning, urging residents to prepare for high winds and low humidity — a combination that intensifies fires.
On Saturday afternoon, the county fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, which were also used during the Tubbs Fire, were buzzing with mobile command units, large food stations and a sea of tents and trailers housing more than 2,000 firefighters and related personnel.
As anxiety grew, local governments tried to calm those who will see their lights go out — again — just as the sun begins to fade.
The utility preemptively shut off power to more than 27,000 customers in Sonoma County this past week as part of an effort to prevent sparks from its equipment during dry and windy conditions. While a state investigation will be required to determine the cause of the Kincade Fire, the utility has said a transmission tower nearby malfunctioned shortly before it began. Its stock price plummeted about 30% Friday to $5.08, a small fraction of its 52-week high of $49.42.
PG&E; filed for bankruptcy protection in January after amassing tens of billions of dollars in liability related to two dozen wildfires in recent years.
Officials have been trying to emphasize to residents that PG&E; is calling the shots, and the governor and furious state representatives said the company had shown it was not capable of consistently providing power to Californians.
“PG&E; is a failure at every level,” said state Sen. Jerry Hill, a Bay Area Democrat who said the courts should take control of the company. “PG&E; should no longer be allowed to do business in California.”
Hill, who is chair of the state Senate’s energy subcommittee, said that roughly 2.5 million to 2.7 million people would lose power when accounting for families and others who share addresses.
At the news conference, Newsom said PG&E; made improvements to some of its operations since a botched power shut-off two weeks ago, when the utility’s website crashed twice and information technology experts from the state were required to help fix the problems. But he said that the utility continued to fail in its communication and that some customers did not receive notification of the weekend’s blackouts until four hours before they were about to lose power.
The governor also reiterated his frustration with PG&E;’s decision to shut off power for hundreds of thousands of customers, rather than the more surgical approach taken by the state’s other two investor-owned utilities, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric.
“A society as industrious and entrepreneurial and innovative as ours should not have to face a choice between public safety and public blackouts,” Newsom said.
Michael Lewis, PG&E;’s senior vice president of electric operations, said Saturday that the utility understood the impact of the shut-offs on Californians but had no other choice because of the severe winds, which he said were predicted to be “the most serious weather situation” the region had experienced in recent memory.
On Friday, Andy Vesey, PG&E;’s chief executive for utility operations, said that drought, dead trees, high winds and low humidity had combined for a potential disaster even more severe than some other recent fires.
“These places we all love have effectively become tinder boxes,” Vesey said. “This is an extraordinary change that we’re living through. At this moment it is part of our lives in California and part of keeping us safe.”
Sonoma County residents scrambled to stock up and ship out Saturday. Manoj Ghimire said he had already sold out of ice and water and seen a spike in people buying beer and milk when he learned the power at Windsor Fast & Easy Mart would be cut off.
As the smoke crept closer and patrol planes whizzed overhead, Sagon and Brendlin jumped in their friends’ cars and hit the road, leaving their own Buick with mechanical troubles in a parking lot.
“We’re just hoping it’s here when we get back,” Sagon said. “But if it isn’t, it wasn’t meant to be.”
This article originally appeared in
.