Aug. 24, 2020, 2:49 p.m. ET
The wildfires have now burned through more than a million acres, but there was some relief for firefighters overnight. “Mother Nature has helped us quite a bit,” one fire commander said.
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The Oakland Zoo is among the institutions that have closed because of concerns about poor air quality in the Bay Area.
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Inmate firefighters worked to contain the L.N.U. Complex fires in Healdsburg, Calif., on Sunday. Credit… Max Whittaker for The New York Times
More than a million acres have burned, but fresh lightning strikes are few.
Clusters of devastating wildfires continued to rage in Northern California on Monday, though there was some relief for firefighters: A turn in the weather did not deliver a feared barrage of new lightning strikes overnight.
More than 14,000 firefighters have been scrambling to protect communities from two dozen major blazes, which have left at least seven people dead and dozens injured, and have forced more than 100,000 people from their homes.
Roughly 1.1 million acres have burned since Aug. 15, according to Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency. Almost 700,000 acres of that have been in the groups of fires known as the L.N.U. Lightning Complex and the S.C.U. Lightning Complex, which have become the second- and third-largest fires in state history.
On Monday morning, the largest, the L.N.U. complex, which stretches across Napa and surrounding counties, was 22 percent contained. The S.C.U. complex, which has burned more than 347,000 acres to the east of San Jose, was 10 percent contained.
Many of the hundreds of fires burning across the state having been sparked by lightning strikes, and there were fears that a new round of dry lightning storms Sunday and Monday would make matters worse. But the lighting strikes so far have not been widespread, and moisture has helped to diminish some of the fires.
“Mother Nature has helped us quite a bit,” said Billy See, a Cal Fire assistant chief.
“We’re going to hopefully see a little bit of a quieter period,” said David King, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the Bay Area. “We didn’t see the thousands and thousands of lightning flashes that we saw last week. But we did see lightning strikes, and it only takes one strike to potentially start a new wildfire.”
Mr. King added that firefighters would still have to deal with warm, dry weather, and the smoky haze in the region was likely to linger.
The weather also helped firefighters make progress against the C.Z.U. Lightning Complex north of Santa Cruz, which has grown to 78,000 acres but is now 13 percent contained.
A 70-year-old man was killed in the fire and found near his home, officials said at a news conference on Monday, adding that he was “likely leaving the fire” in his vehicle. They added that the city of Santa Cruz was not under a direct threat, though thousands of residents from the area are still under evacuation orders.
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Concerns over poor air quality have closed schools and parks.
Smoke-filled air has been a persistent problem for much of the Bay Area, leading to repeated health warnings,interruptions to school reopenings and further threats to businesses already struggling from coronavirus-related closures.
In Concord, the air quality index reached 240 overnight, surging into the “very unhealthy” range, a point at which health experts caution everyone against going outside. By Monday morning, the reading was lower, around 157, which is still considered unhealthy for the general population.
The air quality index goes up to 500, but any reading above 100 is considered unhealthy for sensitive groups. Those with respiratory illnesses like asthma are particularly vulnerable, as are children and the elderly.
In Vallejo, the air quality hovered around 160 after worsening overnight. Air quality around the Bay Area has fluctuated as the fires burn nearby, but readings in recent days have regularly shown that it is unhealthy for people to spend time outside their homes.
The Oakland Zoo, which reopened a few weeks ago after a four-month closure that nearly forced it to shut down permanently, closed its doors again this week because of bad air quality.
Dozens of state parks and beaches have also closed, some Bay Area schools have canceled classes, and coronavirus testing sites have temporarily closed or relocated.
San Jose State University, which was set to reopen for in-person classes last Wednesday, has closed its campus through Tuesday because of concerns about air quality, moving all of its instruction online.
“We understand this is not an ideal start to an already unprecedented fall semester,” wrote Vincent Del Casino, Jr., the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs.
Family members returned to the remains of their home on Sunday after the L.N.U. Lightning Complex fire swept through Vacaville, Calif. Credit… Josh Edelson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Some who are seeking shelter with friends worry about exposing them to the virus.
For families who might ordinarily flee to the homes of relatives or close friends, worries about the virus have complicated those decisions.
Chelsea Sterrett and her husband, both high school teachers, were in the midst of their first week of online instruction when they were ordered to evacuate, as the River Fire, south of Salinas, approached last week.
So they packed up their three children (ages 7, 5 and 1) and a dog, and left home to stay with family friends whom they hadn’t seen in months because of the pandemic.
“The immediate crisis of the fire was bigger than our concerns about Covid,” Ms. Sterrett wrote.
Kevin Susco wrote in an email late last week that his daughter-in-law asked on Tuesday if she and her son, who were under an evacuation warning in Boulder Creek, could stay with him and his wife in Palo Alto.
Their son, he said, is an Army Reservist currently in Kuwait.
“We’ve been together only briefly since the pandemic, because my wife and I are both in our sixties, and we take the threat from the virus seriously,” he wrote in an email. “But we didn’t think about it too much before we said, sure, come over if you need to evacuate.”
Deborah Meltzer, 67, said in an email that she’s one of a growing number of baby boomers who are live-in caregivers to aging parents — in her case, her 100-year-old father.
She lives in Elk Grove, where smoke has filled the air and the dangers, both from the fires and the poor air, are constantly on her mind.
“Quite frankly, I am not sure what I would do or where I would take my dad in the event of an evacuation,” she said.
Fire retardant covered part of Napa County, Calif., on Sunday. Credit… Ian C. Bates for The New York Times
“It’s the new normal — what next?” said Bulah Cartwright, the manager of Inti, a clothing and jewelry store in Napa. “We’ve had earthquakes, fires, flooding. It’s exhausting, but we’ll get through. We’ve gotten through worse.”
Wine country residents are well aware of the perils posed by wildfires. The Tubbs fire swept through the area in 2017, devastating the town of Santa Rosa and killing 22 people. Last year, the Kincade Fire destroyed hundreds of buildings, including much of the Soda Rock winery in Healdsburg.
But shop owners and residents said on Saturday that they were more concerned that the smoke and flames might drive away the tourists upon whom the region relies.
“Business has been slow, obviously,” said Thea Witsil, the owner of Wildcat Vintage Clothing in Napa. It might seem busy on a Saturday, she said, but “come here in the middle of the week, it’s a completely different story.”
Many tourists, though, were also undeterred by the persistent fumes that blew through Napa Valley towns and partially obscured nearby hills.
“We feel bad doing all this nice stuff when people are having to evacuate and lose their homes, but at the same time, if we cancel, we leave a lot of them, as employees, in the dust,” said Daniel, who was visiting Yountville from Los Angeles for his birthday and declined to provide his last name. “I feel like if Covid’s taught us anything, you have got to try to enjoy things and work around life as you can.”
Reporting was contributed by Kellen Browning, Jill Cowan, Jacey Fortin and Lucy Tompkins.
Originally published at https://www.nytimes.com on August 24, 2020.
