Nearly 3 million Californians are expected to lose power and tens of thousands have been ordered to evacuate Saturday as a massive wildfire continues to threaten Northern California.
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) announced the outage, its second planned power shut off this week, out of concern that high winds could down power lines and spark fires. The blackouts are scheduled to affect 940,000 customers – which amounts to nearly 3 million people – in 36 counties, and begin at 2 pm local time, the company tweeted.
Authorities ordered mandatory evacuations for 50,000 people in the Windsor and Healdsburg towns, both located about 70 miles north of San Francisco, on Saturday morning as the massive Kincade fire continued to rage.
Around 2,000 residents in Geyserville, another community in Sonoma County, were already under mandatory evacuation on Thursday.
Cal Fire said the Kincade fire had burned more than 25,000 acres as of Saturday morning and was just 10% contained.
The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning Saturday morning, noting that critically low humidity and strong offshore winds beginning Saturday evening and lasting through Monday morning were likely to create critical fire conditions.
“This event looks to be the strongest since the 2017 wine country fires and potentially a historic event,” the warning said.
Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Essick also compared the scale of evacuations to the deadly 2017 Santa Rosa fires, but said Saturday’s evacuations were the largest he’d conducted in his 26-year career.
“Even that evacuation, at least in the northern Santa Rosa area, was not in comparison to this,” Essick said at a press conference. “In my career here at the sheriff’s office, this is the largest evacuation we’ve conducted.”
Authorities have ordered residents to evacuate by 4 p.m., but urged people to leave as soon as possible before they lose power. Residents in mandatory evacuation zones were told to evacuate to Santa Rosa Veterans Memorial Building, Petaluma Veterans Building, and the Petaluma Fairgrounds.
The cause of the Kincade fire is still under investigation, but a report submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission says the blaze erupted six minutes after one of PG&E’s high-voltage transmission lines in the hills north of San Francisco malfunctioned Wednesday night, hours after a planned shut off.
“Those transmission lines were not deenergized because forecast weather conditions, particularly wind speeds, did not trigger the PSPS protocol,” PG&E said in a statement Thursday.
Cal Fire investigators have previously found power lines and equipment belonging to PG&E to be responsible for sparking wildfires across California.
Lenka Vodicka, 47, of Nevada City, California, told BuzzFeed News that Saturday’s power shut off was the third time in as many weeks that her family has experienced an outage.
“Every few days you prepare for the next one, you have to be in this heightened response to demands that you’re not used to,” Vodicka said. “One thing that’s good is we’re all getting better at it in the community. Now, I know to get instant coffee little things … and so we’re all coming up with skills to meet the challenges but it’s hard it’s a lot of work.”
Vodicka, a freelance photographer, has had gigs canceled and been unable to work at home without power. Instead, her full-time job has been preparing for and cleaning up after each power shut off.
“It’s like my job is now getting the family through the outage over and over again,” she said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a state of emergency on Sonoma County Friday. In a video Saturday, Newsom called PG&E’s impact “unacceptable” and vowed to hold the company responsible for the blackouts and fires.
A state of emergency was also issued for Los Angeles County, where the Tick fire had burned about 4,300 acres by Friday.
- A California Power Line Suffered A Malfunction. Six Minutes Later, A Ferocious Wildfire Was Born.Stephanie K. Baer · Oct. 25, 2019
- “What’s Happened Is Unacceptable”: Californians Are Outraged After Millions Had Their Power Shut OffStephanie K. Baer · Oct. 11, 2019
- Students Live In Tents, Do Homework Under Flashlights, And Deal Without Textbooks Months After California’s Massive Camp FireBrianna Sacks · April 25, 2019
Olivia Niland is a news reporter and curation editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in Los Angeles.
Contact Olivia Niland at [email protected].
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Stephanie Baer is a reporter with BuzzFeed News and is based in Los Angeles.
Contact Stephanie K. Baer at [email protected].
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