Western wildfires updates: Evacuations in California and Oregon as historic fire outbreak engulfs region

It was as if the sun never rose over the San Francisco Bay area Wednesday, and the smoke-induced darkness is throwing people, plants and even power systems off-kilter.

Hudson Fox, a nursery worker at Sloat Garden Center in Mill Valley, Calif., said he thought he accidentally set his alarm for 8 p.m. instead of 8 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday morning. His clock was right. It was the sun that had gone away.

When Fox, 19, arrives at work, the first thing he does is water all the plants. But they were still wet from the previous day’s watering at 1:30 p.m. Fox, who lives near the nursery and had been attending college before the pandemic, has never seen anything like this.

“This is definitely unprecedented,” he said. “It’s apocalyptic.”

The Sloat Garden center is usually busy with landscapers who show up when the doors open at 8 a.m. On Wednesday by 11 a.m., there had been one customer, Fox said.

He said that if the lack of sunlight continues for days, some plants could start to rot if they stay moist and the water isn’t circulated.

“The light usually isn’t the issue — it’s usually keeping the water being regulated and circulated and not to just sit there,” he said.

The lack of sunlight can be seen in the data shared by the California Independent System Operator, which oversees the state’s energy system.

Wednesday at 11:55 a.m., the state’s solar power plants were producing 9,030 megawatts of energy. A week ago at the same time of day, the number was 11,217.

But the difference is likely more dramatic in the Bay Area. Cal ISO doesn’t include solar panels installed in residences. In Corte Madera, Calif., this reporter’s 6-kilowatt home solar array was at zero.

The Bear Fire, located just northeast of Oroville, Calif., and east of Chico, roughly 70 miles north of Sacramento, explosively expanded between Tuesday and Wednesday.

Daniel Swain, a climate researcher at the University of California Los Angeles, estimates that the blaze grew 250,000 acres in 24 hours. The Bear Fire is part of the North Complex Fire, which had charred 254,000 acres as of Wednesday morning, according to the Incident Information System.

The Bear Fire has exhibited extreme behavior, developing towering pyrocumulonimbus clouds more than 40,000 feet high and probably fire tornadoes.

“This is an extremely large, dangerous, and fast-moving wind-driven fire,” Swain tweeted.

This area burned by the North Complex Fire likely ranks as the 9th largest in California history. The 2020 wildfire season had already also produced the second-, third-, and fourth-largest blazes on record in the state.

Overall, 2.5 million acres in California have burned in 2020, the most on record by far, and the state’s offshore wind season, typically the most perilous for fires, is just beginning.

Just north of San Francisco in Mill Valley, the dark skies were confusing some usual early risers.

Ken Kirkland at the Woolly Egg Ranch family farm said his 500 chickens have been silent all morning. When he went out to check on them around 10:30 a.m., they just were standing around staring, confused and not eating.

“They are absolutely quiet, they are dead quiet. They think it’s night,” said Kirkland. “Usually they’d be making all kinds of noise, kicking and scratching.”

It is also affecting their egg production. On Tuesday, Kirkland noticed only 50 egg drops, 25 percent less than the usual amount.

Satellite imagery of the wildfires shows the extensive effects of this unfolding disaster. Meteorologists and climate scientists have been stunned to see this imagery Wednesday, given that the smoke extends up and down the entire West Coast and out into the Pacific, with tendrils reaching northward toward the Gulf of Alaska.

Some of the largest blazes are burning in Oregon, where fires have burned more than 200,000 acres in just a couple of days. Meanwhile in California, more than 2.5 million acres have burned so far this season — a record, according to Cal Fire.

This satellite animation shows both the smoke and satellite detection of hot spots of the fires themselves:

Skies up and down the coastal Pacific Northwest are blazing orange as more than 85 wildfires, including the Glendower Fire — also called the Almeda Fire — in Oregon and the Creek Fire in California, burn throughout the region.

Areas hardest hit by the fires are simultaneously experiencing record temperatures, leaving many residents sweltering indoors, unable to open windows because of floating ash and soot in the air outside.

In Eugene, Ore., temperatures were forecast to hit a high of 97 degrees, prompting local officials to advise residents against opening windows and doors despite the heat.

“If temperatures are going to the point where it’s starting to make [residents] uncomfortable, they need to find another place to be,” Leslie Pelinka, a local PeaceHealth pediatrician, told the Register-Guard. “The answer won’t be to open up their windows and their doors, because that will just permanently impact the quality of the air inside their home.”

Lights had to be placed around the practice putting greens in Napa due to the hazy conditions, the PGA tour said early Tuesday.

The more than two dozen large wildfires blazing across the West are burning amid unusually dry conditions. They are also coming on the heels of a second historic heat wave in two months, which dramatically dried out vegetation, making it burn more readily.

These two factors alone help explain why the region is burning right now, though two other key factors are also at play.

Increasingly tilting the odds to favor extreme events is climate change, research shows. Then there is the extreme weather event hitting the West, part of a flip-of-a-switch weather-pattern shift that sent temperatures crashing from 92 degrees Monday in Denver to 33 degrees and snowing on Tuesday.

Drought is widespread in Washington, Oregon and California, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor and other products.

Additional metrics that are more specific to wildfires show conditions were off-the-charts favorable for fires this week.

John Abatzoglou, a climate researcher at the University of California at Merced, noted one key fire index that measures the thirst of the atmosphere showed record-setting conditions across a vast expanse of the West this week. As he explained on Twitter, the vapor-pressure deficit “is the difference between how much moisture the air can hold (which increases nonlinearly with temperature) and how much moisture is in the air.”

Extremely low vapor pressure means conditions are hot and the air is extremely dry. This, combined with an early-season down-sloping wind event, helped lead to this wildfire outbreak — once sparks lit new blazes and winds hit preexisting fires.

Studies show that early-season down-sloping events may increase in parts of the West as human-caused global warming continues. In addition, a study published last month shows climate change is increasing the risk of extreme wildfire conditions during the fall season in California. The state’s frequency of fall days with extreme fire-weather conditions has more than doubled since the 1980s, the study found.

Smoke from the siege of large fires in the western United States is streaking across the Lower 48 but is most pronounced and unhealthful in California and the Pacific Northwest.

The U.S. government’s AirNow pollution data shows large pockets of code red air quality levels in California, Oregon and Washington. Embedded within those pockets are zones of code purple and even maroon in Oregon, signifying “very unhealthy” and “hazardous” air quality.

The AirNow showed Oregon’s worst air quality just south of Eugene.

“Unfortunately, air quality is still in terrible shape for most cities across the Valley & OR coast,” tweeted Jeff Forgeron, a meteorologist for the Fox television affiliate in Portland.

According to waqi.info, an online database of air quality levels, the pollution in parts of western Oregon was about the worst in the world, trailing only isolated locations in China and India.

Ryan Stauffer, an air quality expert at NASA, said in an interview that the code red conditions in Salem, Ore., have occurred only three other times on record. He called the nearby code maroon levels “exceptionally high” and “rare territory.”

The duration of the compromised air quality has also been notable, Stauffer said, particularly in California.

“This is a multiday event,” he said. “The fact that the smoke has remained draped over California for four days, it’s brutal.”

In California, the worst air quality was just south of Fresno. In San Francisco, the smoke obscured the sun, turning the sky a dark, smoky red hue.

At code purple and maroon levels, adverse health effects from the pollution impact the entire population but are especially dangerous for those with respiratory conditions. Under such conditions, residents are advised to limit time outside and avoid strenuous outdoor activities.

Thousands of Oregon residents were ordered to evacuate their homes late Tuesday as wildfires tore through the southwestern part of the state and prompted Gov. Kate Brown (D) to issue emergency conflagration declarations for at least four separate blazes.

The worst of the fires, called the Alameda Fire and Glendower Fire, stretched along the Pacific Highway from just outside Portland down south to Medford.

At least a dozen areas were under some level of evacuation order early Wednesday, with residents in more than 1,000 homes southeast of Portland and east of Eugene ordered to leave immediately. Officials from Vida and Blue River, unincorporated areas in Lane County near Eugene, said their communities as of Tuesday were “a total loss.”

Just after midnight in Washington County, west of Portland, sheriffs deputies were going door-to-door to rouse people as an order to evacuate immediately took effect.

The Oregon Department of Forestry estimated the fires had burned more than 3,800 acres and as of late Tuesday, the fire was zero percent contained.

“This is proving to be an unprecedented and significant fire event for our state,” Brown said during a Tuesday news conference, and described the intense weather contributing to the wildfires as “a once-in-a-generation event.”

The sheer number of fires burning in the West is a moving target as new blazes erupt, but weather satellites are valuable tools for monitoring them.

Satellite products not only reveal smoke from fires, but can even sense the heat they release and the location of “hot spots,” which can be sensed day or night.

Some on social media were comparing the satellite imagery of California on Tuesday to images from space and on the ground from the Australian fires that started out the year and consumed vast amounts of forests in the eastern parts of the country.

Red flag warnings for dangerous fire weather conditions stretch from the U.S. border with Mexico northward to Canada along the West Coast Wednesday as hot, dry and windy conditions continue to fan existing blazes and fuel new ones.

According to the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center, the fire risk is particularly acute in the higher terrain of western Oregon and northern California. In these areas, relative humidity percentages fare alling into the single digits, temperatures are expected to climb into the low 90s, and winds of 20 to 30 mph “will continue to exacerbate significant issues with large ongoing fires exhibiting extreme behavior,” the Center wrote.

The Center also indicated a “critical” fire risk in the coastal ranges of southern California where Santa Ana winds could gust to 35 to 45 mph.

Winds are forecast to gradually diminish in all of these areas later Wednesday into Thursday. However, the arid conditions “will continue to contribute to an environment favoring plume-dominated fires with extreme behavior,” the Center wrote.

The scope and extent of the fires in the western United States is unprecedented, according to Nick Nauslar, a meteorologist with the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, which coordinates firefighting efforts nationwide.

“I’ve talked to people who have been in fire for 20, 30, 40+ years and they’ve never seen anything like this before,” he wrote in a tweet. “Not this many large, rapidly spreading wildfires across such a broad region.”

In California, nearly 2.3 million acres have burned in 2020, surpassing 2018 for the most acres burned annually in the modern record. In Oregon, more than 230,000 acres have been charred. (That number is likely to rise, though, once the tally from Tuesday and Wednesday is fully incorporated.)

Nauslar is not the only official to describe the situation in such stark terms. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown described the weather contributing to the blazes as “a once-in-a-generation event.”

In Washington state, 330,000 acres had burned into Tuesday. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee called this “an unprecedented event.”

Many meteorologists and weather observers have expressed shock about the situation.

“The wildfire situation in California and Oregon has now escalated to the point that I can no longer keep track of the countless massive, fast-moving, and potentially very dangerous fires,” tweeted Daniel Swain, a climate researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles. “The geographic scale and intensity of what is transpiring is truly jarring.”

“Unbelievable to see forest fires in suburban parts of Western Washington, where it rains 9 months of the year,” tweeted the Seattle Weather Blog. “Just unbelievable.”

Timothy Bella contributed to this report.