Wildfires Rage in California

With roads still blocked by the police and fires still raging across broad swaths of Northern California, Matt Lenzi hiked through smoke-choked vineyards and waded in the Napa River to reach the home his father lived in for 53 years. In its place, he found only blackened debris, blackened earth, and ash.

“Every piece of vegetation was gone,” Lenzi said on Tuesday. He had gone back to his home in the vain hope of finding the pet cat that his father, Carl Lenzi, who is in his 80s, left behind when he fled for his life. “Even the barbecue melted.”

The fires ravaging California’s wine country since Sunday night—part of an outbreak of blazes stretching almost the entire length of the state—continued to burn out of control Tuesday.  By Sunday, the toll rose to more than 40 people confirmed dead, hundreds hospitalized, and an estimated 2,000 buildings destroyed or damaged. But with many people still missing and unaccounted for, and some areas still out of reach of emergency crews, those figures are almost certain to rise, state and local officials warned. The cause of the fires is still under investigation, but dry conditions after a hot summer might be partly to blame, Ken Pimlott, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, told CNN.

The two biggest and most destructive fires consumed more than 52,000 acres in Napa and Sonoma counties, propelled on Sunday night and Monday by 50-mile-per-hour winds and threatening cities that included Santa Rosa, Napa, and Calistoga. On Monday, Gov. Jerry Brown issued emergency proclamations, saying the fires had damaged critical infrastructure and threatened thousands of homes. He also asked President Trump to declare the region a disaster area, which would free up government funds.

The winds died down on Tuesday but were forecast to pick up again later in the week, and Pimlott described the two fires, and a smaller one nearby, as “zero percent contained.”

About 20,000 people heeded evacuation warnings, fleeing on foot and by car as the fires overtook their towns. In Sonoma County, 5,000 people took shelter in evacuation centers on Monday night, the county reported, and new evacuation orders were issued on Tuesday. Survivors told of narrow escapes from walls of flame that seemed to erupt from out of nowhere on Sunday night and Monday morning, forcing them to run even before text messages and other alerts were sent out by emergency warning systems.

“We always thought the alert system would give us time, but there was no notice, no warning,” said Maureen Grinnell, 77, who lived in the hills north of Napa with her husband, Sheldon, 89, who uses a walker.

“By the time I started to back the car out of the garage, the house was already on fire,” she said.

Pamela Taylor, 66, at first watched the fire from the mobile home park in Santa Rosa where she lived, thinking the fire was not near enough to pose a threat—and then, suddenly, it was. “A gigantic fireball jumped across the freeway to the trees around the trailer park,” she said, and within minutes, trailers and cars were ablaze, and people were fleeing.

“There was no turning the gas off. There was just running,” she said.

Now many people in the region must decide how, and where, to reconstruct their lives. Carl Lenzi met with insurance folks, but when his son Matt asked him whether he was going to rebuild he said no.

“I’m not going to do it,” the elder Lenzi said. “This is your problem now.”

Reported by The New York Times.