50,000 ordered evacuate wildfire spread north of LosAngeles

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50,000 ordered evacuate wildfire spread north of LosAngeles

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 24, 2019 11:51 pm

50,000 ordered to evacuate as wildfire spreads north of Los Angeles
The Tick Fire in northern Los Angeles County is one of two major California blazes being fueled by high winds and low humidity.

Oct. 24, 2019, 8:55 PM CDT / Updated Oct. 24, 2019, 9:59 PM CDT
LOS ANGELES — Around 50,000 people north of Los Angeles have been ordered to evacuate after a brush fire broke out Thursday afternoon, officials said.

The Tick Fire near Agua Dulce in northern Los Angeles County has destroyed several structures, the Los Angeles County Fire Department said. It had spread to 3,000 acres and was zero percent contained Thursday evening.

That blaze was one of several in California fueled by high winds and low humidity, conditions that forecasters said were helping the fires grow. The National Weather Service said Santa Ana winds were gusting upwards of 45 to 55 mph across Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

In Northern California, around 2,000 people were ordered to evacuate in a rural part of northern Sonoma County after a fire broke out shortly before 9:30 p.m. Wednesday. It has grown to at least 16,000 acres, officials said.

Forty-nine homes or structures have been destroyed in the Kincade Fire, which broke out near the community of Geyserville, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as Cal Fire. The damage assessment is continuing.

The fire was 5 percent contained as of Thursday evening. Around 1,300 firefighters are on the line and that number is expected to increase Cal Fire Chief Mike Parkes said.

"Because of the terrain of the area, the crews had a difficult time getting around it early on, and the fire grew much more quickly in size," Parkes said.

No injuries have been reported in either fire.

A burning structure collapses during the Kincade fire in Geyserville, California on Oct. 24, 2019.Stephen Lam / Reuters
The threat of wildfires prompted utility company Pacific Gas & Electric to pre-emptively shut off electricity to hundreds of thousands of people on Northern California on Wednesday to try and stop power lines from sparking blazes.

PG&E said in a regulatory filing with the state Public Utilities Commission on Thursday that it learned that a nearby transmission tower malfunctioned about seven minutes before the Kincade Fire erupted Wednesday night.

The utility said it learned from preliminary findings that a "transmission level outage" happened on a 230,000-volt line in the area at 9:20 p.m. Cal Fire says the Kincade Fire broke out at 9:27 p.m..

PG&E had shut off power to around 28,000 customers in Sonoma County, including in the Geyserville area where the fire began, but it did not de-energize transmission lines in the area.

"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, referring to "public safety power shutoff," the term used for the planned blackouts.

"The wind speeds of concern for transmission lines are higher than those for distribution," the utility said in the statement.

The PG&E outages that began Wednesday were the second time in two weeks that the utility shut off power to large swaths of Northern California over fire risk.

In the first shutoff, power was cut to about 2 million people across northern and central California. In recent years, authorities have blamed electrical equipment for causing several deadly and destructive fires.

Weather conditions in Northern California eased Thursday evening, and PG&E said that it has restored electricity to 84 percent of the 179,000 customers who had their power shut off.

A power "customer" can be a single residence or a large business; a standard conversion that many utilities use assesses 2½ people per customer, meaning as many as 450,000 people lost power in Northern California this week.

But forecasters say another wind event could be in store for Northern California on Saturday evening. Weather service meteorologist Robert Baruffaldi of the Sacramento office said that in the next wind event winds of 50 to 60 mph could be seen, with up to 80 mph across the ridge tops.

The National Weather Service in the San Francisco Bay Area tweeted warned that a fire watch would be in place for Sonoma, Napa, and Contra Costa counties, among other areas, beginning Saturday night.


NWS Bay Area

@NWSBayArea
FIRE WEATHER WATCH Sat night through Mon morning.
This event looks to be the strongest of this year and
since the 2017 wine country fires. Strong NE winds will slowly ease later Sun and persist right through Mon morning. This will be a long duration and extreme wind event. #cawx
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“This event looks to be the strongest of this year and since the 2017 wine country fires,” the weather service said.

The Tubbs Fire in Napa and Sonoma counties that year killed 22 people and destroyed more than 5,600 homes and other structures. The cause of the Tubbs Fire has been determined to be from a private electrical system adjacent to a residential structure.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/50 ... s-n1071736
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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