Wildfires raging in California’s wine country are “all combining into one,” Napa County’s fire chief said Friday as firefighters faced more dry, windy conditions.
Fire Chief Barry Biermann said he’s teaming up with the state’s fire protection agency to set up containment lines in “priority spots” in order to keep the fires from spreading.
He said firefighters gained some ground Friday, but could face challenging conditions in the coming days as low humidity and high winds are expected to return.
“Today, the weather is cooperating, but we are going to go back into red flag again,” he said. “And that’s going to be an issue that we will have to keep a close eye with low humidities and potentially wind for the next couple of days.”
Rescue workers in northern California are using cadaver-sniffing dogs to search for bodies in the ruins of homes burned to the ground by wildfires.
The fires north of San Francisco have killed 31 people since Sunday, while no one has yet heard from nearly half of the 900 people officially listed as missing.
Sonoma County Sheriff Robert Giordano said identifying fire victims is going to be hard.
“We have found bodies that are almost completely intact and we have found bodies that are nothing more than ash and bones. One of the ways we make IDs in those cases is through medical devices… where there is a piece of metal left from somebody’s surgery, like a hip replacement with an ID number on it.”
Twenty-two fires were burning Thursday with firefighters partially containing just one. More than 75,000 hectares have burned so far, including some of northern California’s world famous vineyards and wineries. At least 3,500 homes and businesses are destroyed.
By Friday morning, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesman Scott McLean said the fires burning in Sonoma and Napa counties are about 22 percent contained.
All that remains of some neighborhoods are a few blackened chimneys, and charred trees, and burned-out cars.
About 8,000 firefighters from California and as far away as Canada and Australia are hard at work. The strong dry Santa Ana winds that blow down from the mountains every late summer and early fall are creating conditions that make their job extremely hard.
Authorities do not have an exact cause of the fires, but say anything from a downed power line to a thoughtlessly tossed cigarette could have started them.
Police blocked off many roads and prevented people from going into the destroyed neighborhoods, where some people said they no longer recognize streets and surroundings.
But Dave Larson, of Glen Ellen sneaked into his destroyed neighborhood to look for his cats and to see if any of his neighbors’ homes still stood. He knew his was gone.
“This to me is like a nuclear bomb went off,” Larson said near his home. “I’ve woken up the last two mornings, thinking it was maybe a dream but then I realized I have nothing. I have someone else’s clothes now. It’s bizarre having nothing.”
As he surveyed the damage, he marveled how some of his neighbors’ homes survived. He said he regretted that he hadn’t stayed, like his neighbors, standing on the roof with his hose and fighting the fire himself.
Larson’s classic car collection was a smoldering heap of metal. And his antiques were gone.
But he found something of sentimental value propped up against his melted flat screen TV— his grandfather’s 100 year-old rifle, a memento from World War Two. The gun, covered in soot and ash, looked like a burnt stick, although its bayonet was still intact. Larson said he wished he had grabbed the gun as he left.
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