More evacuations were ordered by Santa Rosa officials.
Above: The red lines on the map were the perimeters of the Nuns and Atlas Fires Friday in northern California at around 10 p.m. PDT. The white lines were the perimeters about 24 hours earlier. The yellow and red dots represent heat detected by a satellite on Friday night and Saturday, as late as 12:57 p.m. PDT.
(Originally published at 6:07 p.m. PDT October 14, 2017)
Additional evacuations were ordered Saturday in northern California by Santa Rosa officials for areas endangered by the 46,104-acre Nuns Fire. The new mandatory area is north and south of Hwy 12 between Calistoga Road and Adobe Canyon Road.
Friday night and Saturday morning the most active areas on the Nuns Fire were on the northeast side of the huge fire. Overnight winds pushed the fire toward the Oakmont community in Santa Rosa and kept the fire spreading east of Sonoma.
On Friday the Nuns Fire grew by over 4,000 acres.
The Atlas Fire is east of the Nuns Fire, Highway 29, Yountville, and Napa. It was much less active than the Nuns Fire, growing by about 211 acres on Friday to bring the total up to 50,872 acres. Satellites detected much less heat than was seen on the Nuns Fire.
This appears to be #TableFire 17 miles SW of S. Lake Tahoe. Large amt of smoke, some of it’s from firing operation. And, sat photo of N Cal pic.twitter.com/HvthpuL8k9
This is what smoke from the fires in northern California looks like as seen from the Earth Polychromatic Camera on the DSCOVR spacecraft orbiting a million miles away. (via @SanGasso and NASA)
Above: map showing four of the larger wildfires north of San Francisco: Pocket Fire, Tubbs Fire, Nuns Fire, and Atlas Fire. They were mapped Thursday night between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. PDT.
(Originally published at 11:28 a.m. PDT October 13, 2017)
Calmer winds and higher humidity on Thursday slowed wildfires burning north of San Francisco in Sonoma and Napa Counties, allowing firefighters to make progress toward containment, but each of the large blazes still added thousands of acres to their footprints.
Statewide in California there are 17 active wildfires that have burned a total of 221,754 acres. Approximately 8,000 firefighters are battling the blazes and thousands of residents have evacuated. At least 3,500 homes have been destroyed this week according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The death toll has risen to 31 and many people are unaccounted for.
Here is a closer look at the four largest fires in Sonoma and Napa Counties, working north to south. The sizes were updated by mapping flights Thursday night and total about 137,000 acres:
The Pocket Fire northeast of Geyserville and southeast of Cloverdale has grown to 9,996 acres. It was most active on the southeast side Thursday.
The 34,617-acre Tubbs Fire has burned at least 2,800 homes and many commercial buildings in Santa Rosa and Sonoma County. It did not expand much on Thursday, but was fairly active in some areas on the north and northeast sides. The fire is also burning in Napa County and is on both sides of Highways 128 and 101.
The Nuns Fire has merged with the Adobe and Norrbom Fires between Highways 116 and 121 — north, northwest, and east of Sonoma in both Napa and Sonoma Counties. The combined blaze now covers 44,381 acres. It was active on Friday northeast of the city of Sonoma and on the east flank in Napa County.
The Atlas Fire has burned 48,228 acres and is 17 miles long and about 6 miles wide. It is southeast, east, and north of Napa, primarily in Napa County.
The strong winds that have driven the fires decreased Friday, but Red Flag Warning conditions will return Friday night and Saturday with 20 to 30 mph northeast winds gusting at 40 to 50 mph. Isolated gusts up to 60 are possible on the highest ridges and peaks. The humidity will be in the teens during the day and between 25 and 35 percent at night.
The Red Flag Warning is in effect from 5 p.m. PDT Friday until 11 p.m. Saturday.
In the video below, Tanker 944, a 747, drops on the Pocket Fire.
(Above: A firefighter works in Northern California. Photo courtesy CAL FIRE).
It was only a matter of time.
As follows almost every major natural disaster in recent years, emergency officials are under fire for what some say was lackluster performance when it came to warning people about the oncoming siege of fire marching toward their homes early Monday.
Why weren’t more cell phone alerts issued?
Why wasn’t there more advance notice?
What worked, and what didn’t?
With at least 31 lives lost as a result of the fast-moving fires across Northern California’s wine country, they’re fair questions — questions that will no doubt come to dominate the conversation in coming weeks and months.
But while there are always things to learn from, it is worth remembering this was not a disaster that had a days-long build-up, like a hurricane. For many near the point of origin, there wasn’t even an hours-long build up, like severe weather such as tornadoes. Rather, many families went to bed Sunday before any fires had ignited, only to be awoken in the middle of the night to commands from a loudspeaker outside, a neighbor pounding on the door, or — maybe — a telephone call.
As it relates to messaging, here’s a rundown of what we know:
Officials did not issue Amber-Alert-style cell phone messages in Napa and Sonoma counties. These alerts, administered through the Wireless Emergency Alert System, light up cell phones and trigger an un-mistakable screeching sound when a child is missing and in danger in the recipient’s area. Though they are almost guaranteed to wake people from a dead sleep, they are not necessarily intended for neighborhood-level evacuations.
According to the FCC, the alerts are broadcast from cell towers whose coverage area best matches the zone of an emergency to “phones that are using the cell towers in the alert zone.” Depending on the region and how connected residents are to cell phone networks, that could result in a widespread, wide-radius of messaging.
And that could have resulted in a widespread shadow evacuation in which everyone — not just those in immediate evacuation zones — hits the roads in the middle of the night in a panic, potentially leading to any number of other emergencies, officials maintain.
“It would cause unnecessary evacuations and delays for emergency vehicles reaching people in areas in need,” said county spokeswoman Jennifer Larocque, according to The Mercury News. “In order not to slow down response to people actually in need of help, we chose not to send the notice.”
Officials did send alerts through a regional opt-in system. Areas across the country have similar opt-in programs that are more tailored for individual, neighborhood-level messaging. These are used for everything from issuing shelter-in-place orders during police activity to communicating flood and wildfire evacuations. In Northern California, the service is called Nixle, part of the Everbridge system of emergency alerts.
Though beneficial, residents have to register for the service, a quick process but a process nonetheless. And there remains the challenge of reaching people in the middle of the night, as was the case this week.
It seems pertinent here to mention media, both social and traditional. Though news reporters were quick to begin reporting on the fires, and many were on the fire line overnight, residents were likely slow to tune in, at least initially. And social media, the means through which many community-level communications are handled by way of Facebook or NextDoor, was a vacuum at first. If you posted something, it might not have been seen until the morning.
So that leaves word-of-mouth. There are scores of harrowing stories of neighbors warning neighbors, showing up on doorsteps, blaring horns and doing everything they could to simply get people to wake up and look outside. This was how many people learned of the urgency. This, many have said, was the best way to get the word out.
“The smoke and ash and embers were raining down, sparking spot fires,” Paul Lowenthal, assistant fire marshal in Santa Rosa, recalled in an interview Wednesday with The Washington Post. “It didn’t take but moments for people to look out their front doors and see what was happening.”
It’s less than ideal. But in some cases, it’s all there can be.
As an aside, my graduate research was about evacuation communications during the 2013 Colorado Flood, which devastated a swath of the state and carved communities into islands. The gist: social ties matter within a community during disaster events. And while technology can certainly help, it cannot be the only answer, nor can it be the answer without considering the role of local first responders. People go through a two-step process during evacuations: hearing an alert and seeking additional information. It is inherently a social experience. Accordingly, communication infrastructure is vital as people both receive initial information and seek additional details, through whatever means necessary discussed earlier in this piece.
All of that to say cell phone towers becoming compromised during a disaster — as was the case during this week’s wildfire outbreak — will no doubt be a topic officials hone in on, with good reason.
In March, I wrote a piece for Wildfire Today about issues continuing to play out surrounding evacuations in Gatlinburg, a starkly different situation, but relevant still. Essentially, city officials there, it was determined, downplayed the threat early in the incident. Then, when hurricane-force winds tore through the region and fanned the flames, a “communication failure” caused by disabled communication services prevented the immediate issuance of a timely alert. Alternative sources of emergency communication — local media, for example — had only a marginal effect.
It’s only been five days since fires in Northern California erupted. The questions, after-actions reviews and analyses will be long coming.
Communicating breaking news or public safety-related evacuation messages to off-line, at-risk populations during a dynamic disaster event is a seemingly impossible conundrum. It is one that researchers have spent decades studying in various forms, whether under the umbrella of the sociology of disaster or the various hazard communication models within emergency management.
Going forward, with a continuous onslaught of disasters now reality, it’s an area that should not be ignored.
