Glass Fire Triples in Size, Forces Thousands to Flee in Santa Rosa and Napa Valley

Sep 28, 2020

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A car destroyed by the Shady-Boysen fire complex sits off Highway 12 near Oakmont in Sonoma County on Sept. 28. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

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Update, 8 p.m. Monday: More than 68,000 people in Sonoma and Napa counties have been evacuated from their homes, said Cal Fire Division Chief Ben Nicholls in an evening briefing. Many more residents have been warned that they might still have to flee, he said.

Still, Nicholls sounded a hopeful note in regard to a forecast that called for less powerful winds overnight.

"We don't have those critical burning conditions that we were experiencing the last two nights," he said. "So firefighters across the board here on the Glass and Shady fires... are feeling much more confident tonight than they were last night."

Also on Monday evening the city of Calistoga in coordination with Napa County expanded a mandatory evacuation order to cover the entire town.

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Manana Cutidz, who evacuated from Calistoga Sunday evening, has had to evacuate during the last three fire seasons.

"It felt like you are sitting by the fireplace and wind just burns your face, eyes and everything,” Cutidz said. “[The] wind had that noise like, it's mystical. It was just amazing because that kind of noise, it's like Mother Nature is crying, screaming for help," she said.

Cutidz urged people to take care care of each other: "Show your kindness. We are nothing compared to what nature can do to us. Be nice to nature — be nice to everyone.”

Update, 4:25 p.m. Monday: The Glass Fire — which now includes the Shady and Boysen fires and is continuing to threaten eastern Santa Rosa — has tripled in size since 9:30 a.m. and has now scorched more than 36,000 acres in Napa and Sonoma counties. Over 1,000 firefighters are currently battling the blaze, including 68 people incarcerated in California prisons, according to a state corrections official.

Original Post:
A series of windblown blazes in the North Bay grew rapidly overnight, burning on both sides of the northern Napa Valley and closing in on the eastern edges of the city of Santa Rosa by Monday morning, forcing thousands of Sonoma and Napa County residents to evacuate.

The wine country inferno began with the Glass Fire, which ignited early Sunday morning near the Deer Park community in the hills northeast of St. Helena. Then, on the west side of Napa Valley, the Shady and Boysen fires were sparked just after sunset Sunday evening, potentially from embers blown across the valley from the Glass Fire, but the cause of the fires has not yet been determined.

In an eerie parallel to the devastating 2017 Tubbs Fire that killed 22 people and destroyed thousands of homes, the Shady and Boysen blazes merged and made a swift run overnight through the dry grassland hills along the Napa-Sonoma County line on a southwestern trajectory toward Santa Rosa. Cal Fire now considers all three blazes to have merged.

"This isn't our first rodeo experiencing this," said Santa Rosa Mayor Tom Schwedhelm, urging residents to have go-bags ready and immediately evacuate when told to do so.

"When you get the word to go, please go. Don't think about it. Don't try to stay back," he said. "We're all in this together."

"It is very unfortunate. I live in the Coffey Park area, so we're very familiar with this," he added, referencing a neighborhood decimated by the 2017 Tubbs Fire. "Unfortunately, with the smoke cover and the smoke in the air, it's a very difficult time for all Santa Rosans."

More than 53,000 people in Sonoma and Napa counties were under evacuation orders Monday morning, said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director with Cal Fire. Many more have been warned that they may have to flee.

Paul Lowenthal, another Cal Fire spokesman, said more than 13,000 homes were threatened in Santa Rosa alone.

“In some parts of Santa Rosa, they're mopping up hot spots," he said. “In other parts, they’re still actively fighting fire."

The fire-spreading winds had, however, died down by late Monday morning, giving crews the opportunity to better contain the blaze, said Cal Fire Division Chief Ben Nicholls.

Officials were still unclear on the extent of the damage in the city.

"Due to the nature and the spread of this fire, the most important thing has been getting evacuations and trying to put the fire out versus assessing the amount of damage and the spread," Schwedhelm said.

"I understand it's gotten into Trione-Annadel State Park, so we've issued some mandatory evacuation orders on the south side of that park," he added. "Again, I'm just hoping we can limit it to there and it doesn't get into residential areas in southeast Santa Rosa."

Photos before dawn Monday from Kent Porter, a veteran photographer for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, showed homes burning in the Santa Rosa's Oakmont and Skyhawk neighborhoods.

By early Monday morning, Highway 12 in Santa Rosa was already jammed with thousands of residents evacuating their homes. Cal Fire radio traffic at 1:30 a.m. Monday reported that the fire had jumped into Oakmont, one of the evacuated neighborhoods.

Across Sonoma County, about 48,500 residents were subject to either evacuation orders or warnings as of early Monday afternoon, said Sonoma County Director of Emergency Management Chris Godley. There are five shelters currently available for evacuees, he said, but capacity is limited because of COVID-19 concerns.

"At this time, our numbers are very low in each shelter," noting that all shelters will provide enough space for social distancing and will be frequently sanitized, with required health screenings for everyone entering.

The county is also placing high-risk evacuees in hotel rooms and working with Sonoma State University to open dorm rooms, Godley added.

U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, said at a press briefing Monday that 75% of fire management costs will be covered by grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Of the fires, he added, "It's just one more year of the same thing, and it's getting a little old."

Cal Fire crews, assisted by dozens of mutual aid municipal fire companies, continued to scramble Monday to save homes and rescue residents trapped by rapidly advancing flames.

Residents of the Oakmont Gardens assisted living home in Santa Rosa boarded brightly lit city buses overnight, some wearing bathrobes and using walkers. They wore masks to protect against the coronavirus as orange flames marked the dark sky.

Pierre LaBerge, an 86-year-old resident of Spring Lake Village, a retirement complex near Oakmont, was one of many seniors who sought emergency shelter at multiple locations and waited outside for hours.

“People were alerted. We all had go bags. We were ready to go, the only part that kind of fell apart in this, [is] where do we go?” LaBerge said. “We got to the Veterans Building and they were absolutely not ready for us. So there was a significant problem, and everybody stood around from 6:30 [p.m.] or so, until about midnight.”

LaBerge also evacuated during the Tubbs Fire in 2017, but said this time was different.

"I don't think we had more than a 30 minutes notification that we could be in problem before they said, 'Go.' ... The previous time we went to the fairgrounds, and it was very efficient. But this has been not too perfect," he said.

Flames also engulfed the Chateau Boswell Winery north of St. Helena. The Adventist Health St. Helena hospital suspended care and transferred all patients elsewhere, according to a statement on its website.

“We just don’t have words,” state Sen. Mike McGuire, a Democrat who represents Healdsburg, told KTVU-2 in Oakland. “It’s an incredibly trying and emotional time right now.”

Evacuations were also ordered Monday in Shasta County as the Zogg Fire spread over 23 square miles. Residences are widely scattered in the forested area, about 10 miles southwest of the city of Redding in a region torched just two years ago by the massive and deadly Carr Fire — infamously remembered for producing a huge tornado-like fire whirl.

The causes of the new fires are under investigation.

Numerous studies in recent years have linked bigger wildfires in America to global warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas, especially because climate change has made California much drier. A drier California means plants are more flammable.

During the weekend, Pacific Gas & Electric turned off electricity to targeted areas where the winds raised the potential for arcing or other power equipment damage that could spark new fires.

So far this year, more than 8,100 California wildfires have scorched 5,780 square miles, destroyed more than 7,000 buildings and killed 26 people.