Hundreds
of sleep-deprived, stubble-faced firefighters, their yellow coats
layered with soot, assembled here Wednesday to hear their commanders say
what they already knew: The fires that have devastated California’s wine country were still spreading, nowhere near containment, and the crews battling the blazes were stretched to their limits.
“I
wish I could say the cavalry is coming — it’s not,” Battalion Chief
Kirk Van Wormer of Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency, told the
gathering of firefighters, flecks of ash raining down on them. “Look to
your left and look to your right. Those are the people you are
responsible for right now.”
Fanned by warm, dry winds,
the fires have grown so big, so fast, that the immediate goal fire
officials set was not so much to stop the spread as to slow it, to
channel it away from threatened cities and towns, and to save lives.
Saving homes and businesses was secondary.
The
fires have killed at least 29 people in Northern California, officials
said on Thursday. Fifteen of the deaths were in Sonoma County. Officials
cautioned that the figures could rise as emergency workers are able to
return to scorched areas and search for hundreds of people who have been
reported missing.
Robert
Giordano, the Sonoma County sheriff, said, “So far, in the recoveries,
we have found bodies that were almost completely intact, and we have
found bodies that were nothing more than ash and bones.” In some cases,
he said, the only way to identify the victims was by the serial numbers
stamped on artificial joints and other medical devices that were in
their bodies.
Statewide, there were 21 major fires
burning on Thursday, having consumed more than 191,000 acres since the
outbreak began on Sunday night, said Ken Pimlott, the chief of Cal Fire,
the state firefighting agency. The number of separate fires rises and
falls often, as new blazes flare up and old ones merge with one another,
but the size of the devastated area has grown steadily.
In
the hardest-hit region, in Napa and Sonoma Counties, the sun was an
orange dot in a leaden haze. There were eight major blazes there on
Thursday, and the burned area grew to more than 120,000 acres, Cal Fire
reported. The agency said that the 34,000-acre Tubbs Fire, which has
burned parts of the city of Santa Rosa and has threatened Geyserville,
was 10 percent contained, but most of the other blazes in wine country
were 3 percent contained or less.
Officials
threw out sobering figures on the scale of the devastation, with the
caveat that the numbers were just estimates, sure to rise when the
crisis has abated enough to allow an accurate damage assessment.
Thousands of structures have been destroyed, many more are threatened,
and tens of thousands of people have been displaced.
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A man hosed down the roof of his home in Agua Caliente, Calif.Credit
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
“These
fires are literally just burning faster than firefighters can run,” Mr.
Pimlott said. Wind-whipped embers leapfrogged past the exhausted fire
crews, he said, so “we are attacking many, many new fires that we put
out while they are still small.”
Almost
8,000 state and local firefighters battled the blazes, using more than
550 fire engines, 73 helicopters and more than 30 airplanes, state
officials said, with additional crews and 320 more fire engines en route
from neighboring states and from federal agencies. But vast as the
resources were, they clearly were not enough.
The
standard practice in a California wildfire is for firefighters to work
24-hour shifts, and then have 24 hours off. But many firefighters in
Sonoma and Napa have had no real rests for days, catching a few hours of
sleep on the ground or in their trucks.
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