Statewide emergency as Wild fire rage in California

Thousands of people were ordered to evacuate the regions surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday as around 40 wildfires blazed across the state amid a blistering heat wave at present is its second week. Smoke blanketed the city of San Francisco.

“Throughout the state of California right now, we are stretched thin for crews” because of the fires, said state fire spokesman ,Will Powers. “Air resources have been stretched thin throughout the whole state.”

Earlier on Wednesday, the police and firefighters went door-to-door in a frantic scramble to warn the residents to evacuate as fire encroached on Vacaville, a city of nearly100,000 that lies between San Francisco and Sacramento. Fire officials stated that around 50 structures were destroyed , 50 damaged, and four people were injured.

Footage on Television showed that some homes in flames and thick ash dropping in a rural area near the Interstate 80 as the fire appeared to approach towards more densely populated areas.

Diane Bustos told the KPIX-TV that she and her husband tried to drive out but their vehicle caught on fire and they had to flee on foot.

“I got all these flames on me and I lost my shoe, but I made it. God saved me,” she said.

The blaze was exhibiting “extreme fire behavior” and challenging firefighters, said the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection

To the south in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, around 22,000 people were ordered to evacuate due to the fire that was burning in dense wooded parkland but threatened communities, said Jonathan Cox ,Cal Fire spokesman .

“This is a very active timber fire burning in two counties with a serious threat to both public safety and for structures that are out in front of it,” he informed.

Thousands of homes and businesses were also threatened in the wine growing counties of Napa and Sonoma in a area devastated by a series of deadly blazes in the last three years. At least seven fires were grouped together as one of two major Lightning Fires in Northern California, a nod to their origins just a day earlier.

Powers said that  much of the fire was burning via rural areas with steep terrain, making it difficult for the crews to get in.

80, Gail Bickett in Napa County,  loaded up her three dogs in a truck to evacuate as the fire burned behind all the houses across the road, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

“It’s scary,” Bickett said. “It’s overwhelming.”

]A cluster of 20 separate lightning sparked fires threatened around1,400 structures in rugged terrain with dense brush in the East San Francisco Bay. Strong winds and low humidity made the firefight more challenging.

Blazes engulfed the rural and forest areas near the San Francisco Bay Area, near Salinas in Monterey County, around Oroville Dam north of Sacramento, in forested areas west of Silicon Valley, in remote Mendocino County and near the Nevada state line north of Lake Tahoe.

Also Several were burning in northern coastline areas and in Southern California.

Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a state of emergency on Tuesday.

The cluster of wine country fires threaten an area that only last year grappled with other massive blaze that forced 200,000 to flee, a task made more complicated this year because of the pandemic.

On Tuesday afternoon, the fire was moving toward an area called Atlas Peak that was burned in 2017 in a blaze that killed 6 people and destroyed around 800 buildings. The California Highway Patrol stated that Helicopter crews were unable to do rescues in the area because of the smoke was too thick to fly in.

Robin Sisemore hosed down the vegetation in front of her mother’s adjacent house. Both homes were new, by replacing ones that were burned three years ago.

To the south, evacuations were ordered for all of Boulder Creek to the west of Silicon Valley, a community of 5,000 high in the Santa Cruz mountains where windy, long, forested roads, some paved, some dirt, can easily become blocked during storms or fires.

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