Kincade Fire

[Yazata]

In Sonoma County, near Geyserville. Currently 10,000 acres and no containment. All of Geyserville is under mandatory evacuation orders.

https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/9950/kinca...019-am.jpg

https://twitter.com/CALFIRELNU

https://twitter.com/SonomaScanner

[Secular Sanity]

In Sonoma County, near Geyserville. Currently 10,000 acres and no containment. All of Geyserville is under mandatory evacuation orders.

https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/9950/kinca...019-am.jpg

https://twitter.com/CALFIRELNU

https://twitter.com/SonomaScanner

Yet again.

The Kincade fire is near the area where the shut-offs were initiated. No one knows the cause as of yet,  but two fires started, one in Marine County and the other in Sonoma County. The cause is still undetermined but there is a recording of a dispatcher saying that there’s possible power lines down.

Newsom is really pissed and firing off at PG&E saying, "It’s more than just climate change, and it is climate change, but it’s more than that. As it relates to PG&E, it’s about dog-eat-dog capitalism meeting climate change, it’s about corporate greed meeting climate change, it’s about decades of mismanagement."

[Yazata]

http://nixle.us/alert/7604454/

7 PM press conference coming up. If they are holding the conference in Geyserville, that's good news as the town was rush-evacuated this morning with Sheriff's cars going through the streets with loudspeakers telling everyone to get out NOW. Last I heard, the fire was at the edge of town. They must have a fire line in and are holding it.

It may or may not be streamed on the Sonoma Sheriff's facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/sonoma.sheriff/

Sonoma County says that the Healdsburg evacuation center is at capacity and they are advising people to go down to Santa Rosa.

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(This is what "MODIS data" is.)

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[Yazata]

News Conference just wrapped up.

Fire now 16,000 acres approximately. 5% containment.

No new evacuations. No earlier evacuations have been lifted.

US 101 (the big freeway) is open and they don't anticipate it being closed.

Current count is 49 structures destroyed.

This morning there were 300 firefighters, around noon maybe 500. Now there are 1,300 and by tomorrow there should be 2,000. Coming from all over Northern California.

8 air tanker airplanes, but they weren't flown much today because of high winds.

0 reports of looting.

0 fatalities.

0 missing persons.

[Secular Sanity]

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the focus is turning to PG&E equipment.

PG&E told state regulators Thursday that equipment on a transmission tower broke near the origin point of the fire, near Geyserville in northeastern Sonoma County. PG&E identified an outage on the tower shortly before the fire was reported at about 9:25 p.m. on Wednesday.

For PG&E the possibility that one of its faulty transmission lines caused the Kinade Fire is a nightmare scenario. The beleaguered utility has expended considerable political capital in implanting its planned power outage program, a move intended to reduce the fire risk but angered customers and politicians alike. It could also complicate its already contentious and highly complicated bankruptcy case. 

If state investigators ultimately confirm PG&E equipment stated the fire, it will be the latest in a long series of disasters and controversies the have embroiled the San Francisco company for the better part of a decade. They include a deadly gas pipeline explosion and a series of horrific and record-setting wildfires in 2017 and 2018 that drove PG&E into bankruptcy protection in January.

Bill Johnson, CEO of the utility’s parent PG&E Corp., said that the cause of the fire has yet to be determined. He also defended the company’s maintenance of the transmission line in question, telling reports that the tower in question is 43 years old and has been inspected four times in the past two years, including manually and by drone this year.

Hours before the fire broke out, PG& E had shut off its low-voltage distribution lines in that area but PG&E did not turn off its 230,000-volt and 115,000-volt transmission lines in the area. Transmission lines, the kind of equipment that started last year’s devasting Camp fire, carry electricity at high voltages across long distances before the power is stepped down at a substation and delivered to homes via distribution lines. PG&E criteria to turn off transmission lines had not been met, spokesman Paul Doherty said.

[C C]

If the so-called solution "options" remain stymied for their various reasons, looks like the usual procedure of blame and litigation will continue (with the empty handwaving about reform); and thereby little halt to the ongoing degradation of the system. PG&E's management has surely already been shaken up at times since the 2010 explosion, with the new "safety-first" plug-ins apparently just resuming familiar habits or being impotent against the massive task looming over them.

Among the options under consideration by the California Public Utilities Commission are breaking up the utility’s natural gas and electric distribution and transmission divisions; replacing part or all of the utility’s board of directors and its corporate management; conditioning its equity return on safety; reorganizing the company into regional subsidiaries; or making PG&E a public utility.

Some PG&E critics have called for a government takeover or for the massive company to be replaced by smaller, municipal utilities. But it’s far from clear that local governments across Northern and Central California have the ability or the desire to take control of PG&E’s infrastructure, and to assume the huge liabilities that running the power grid entails. And state officials aren’t likely to support a takeover because then the utility’s problems would become Sacramento’s problems instead. “For the state to take over every bit of the wildfire liabilities is just insane,” said Mike Gatto, a former state lawmaker who led the Assembly’s utilities committee.

A sale of PG&E’s gas business, the possibility of which was reported last week by National Public Radio, wouldn’t fix the utility’s safety problems. But it could help the company pay down billions of dollars in wildfire-related costs. For now, it’s unclear how realistic such a sale would be. PG&E’s guaranteed customer base and its nearly 50,000 miles of natural gas pipelines would almost certainly attract potential buyers. But a sale would need to be approved by the Public Utilities Commission, which could require any buyer to take steps to protect ratepayers. Another obstacle is organized labor, a politically powerful group that is already objecting to a potential sale.

Commission President Michael Picker has said California won’t let PG&E go bankrupt. He compared the process of reforming the troubled company to “repairing a jetliner while it’s in flight.” “Crashing a plane to make it safer isn’t good for the passengers,” Picker said ... For one thing, a bankruptcy could lead to higher rates for PG&E customers.


What PG&E said: In 2009, PG&E’s widely circulated policy was: “safety comes first, compliance comes first.”

What PG&E did: After the 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion, which killed eight people and destroyed a neighborhood, investigators discovered that the utility’s top management had used ratepayer funds intended for maintenance to pay for executive bonuses and shareholder dividends.

What PG&E said: In 2015, after the California Public Utilities Commission fined PG&E $1.6 billion for causing the San Bruno explosion, then-PG&E CEO Anthony Earley said, “We are deeply sorry for this tragic event and we have dedicated ourselves to re-earning the trust of our customers and the communities we serve. The lessons of this tragic event will not be forgotten.”

What PG&E did: Three years later, the consulting firm Northstar conducted an exhaustive review of PG&E’s overall safety performance. It found that since the San Bruno pipeline explosion in 2010, “PG&E has repeatedly stated its intention to change its safety culture. … Nevertheless, the report also finds that PG&E’s overall progress is uneven across its gas and electric lines of business, and that while there are many programs under way, they do not yet add up to a consistent, robust, and accountable corporate-wide safety program.”

What PG&E said: Following the deadly 2017 Wine Country wildfires, PG&E’s senior vice president of Electric Operations, Pat Hogan, said, “Our system and our mindset need to be laser-focused on working together to help prevent devastating wildfires like the ones in the North Bay in October and in Southern California in December from happening again, and in responding quickly and effectively if they do. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.”

What PG&E did: PG&E had known for at least seven years that its electrical towers near where the Camp Fire blaze started were aging and needed to be replaced. In a 2014 email, PG&E said that “the likelihood of failed structures is high.” The utility also found damage — a broken hook that supports high voltage wires — and “wear” on the nearly 100-year-old transmission tower where the devastating Camp Fire would later start in the early morning of Nov. 8. But the tower was not repaired or replaced.

What PG&E said: In November, 2016, when Geisha Williams was named to replace Earley as CEO, she said: “We are … well positioned for growth with substantial infrastructure investments focused on continuing to enhance the safety and reliability of our system while enabling California’s clean energy economy.”

What PG&E did: In March, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup found that PG&E had not done enough to prevent wildfires through tree trimming and other maintenance work — even while its shareholders made millions. “PG&E pumped out $4.5 billion in dividends and let the tree budget wither,” Alsup said https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/05/19/e...-pge-does/

[Yazata]

As of this morning, the cause of the fire is still under investigation. Assigning blame at this point is premature.

https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/9979/kinca...619_am.pdf

Map of Kincade fire in link below. The blue area is the evacuation zone, while the red is the fire. Data on that is coming from a NASA Earth observation satellite. It includes fire intensity at different points. The good news is that it appears that the fire isn't advancing to the west and is growing less intense there. That's where most people live and where Geyserville is. The bad news is that the fire is more intense and is growing into the hills to the north and east. Fire size is now about 25,000 acres and is only 10% contained. It looks like Lake County may come into play if this trend continues.

2090 firefighters, 179 engines, 10 helicopters, 24 dozers. 

https://sonomacounty.maps.arcgis.com/app...22aa794617

[Yazata]

Saturday PM update: Things seem to be kind of confused right now. Little information, lots of rumors. From what I can tell, the winds are expected to pick up and shift from blowing east to blowing west this evening after dark. Sixty to eighty mile per hour winds forecasted in places. (Last time they predicted that, nothing happened. I'm a bit skeptical about these forecasts.) Cal Fire sounds scared that the fire may grow explosively and nobody wants to see what happened to Santa Rosa before happen again.

Reports of evacuations underway as I write this in Healdsburg (pop 12,000) and Windsor (pop 27,000). A disquieting piece of news is that evacuation warnings (to be ready to leave, not orders no leave right now) have been issued for the entire Russian river area, all the way to the Pacific coast near Bodega Bay. This is most everything north of Santa Rosa, a huge woodsy exurban area. Right now, the evacuations just look precautionary, in case of a worst-case scenario. Hopefully it doesn't materialize.

http://nixle.us/alert/7609210/

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10223...ws-to-more

Big-time electricity shutoffs are underway, for hundreds of thousands of customers. It looks like this will extend from Santa Cruz in the south to southern Humboldt County in the north. My electricity is still on.

The Sonoma County map has been updated

https://sonomacounty.maps.arcgis.com/app...22aa794617

A new thing in Sonoma County is that police cars and fire trucks have sirens that can make different sounds. One of them is a European-style repeating high-low tone. They are saying that's currently being used only to signal evacuations, so that if a police car or fire truck rolls through sounding like the German polizei, it's time to go.

https://twitter.com/SantaRosaFire/status...1597094914

Edit: The evacuation warnings in the extensive western area through the Russian River have been changed to mandatory evacuation orders.

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[Yazata]

Latest Cal Fire Update:

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[Secular Sanity]

Our power was shut off last night at 6:48 p.m. I woke this morning to the sound of severe winds. The sun just came up. Trees are down everywhere.

I was in Geyserville on Friday. The fire was still high in the mountains. The smoke cleared by the time I reached Healdsburg. I was driving through Napa. My brother lives in the bay area. I have some friends that built a beautiful home on Mark West Springs. They lost it during the last fire. I drove by their house to see how it was coming along. It was finished and gorgeous, but unfortunately, they were forced to evacuate again.

I always take the Silverado Trail to my brother’s. The drive is gorgeous, beautiful wine country. I drove past this winery on Friday. It's called Soday Rock Winery. I've always loved it because of the old rock work. This is what it looked like before the fire. Before it became a winery in 1869, it was a general store and post office. The metal warthog that you see in the photo is a sculpture that a local artist built for Burning Man. The winery purchased the sculpture in 2016. Hwy 101 is closed now. Inmates are being transferred to Alameda County. Sutter Hospital is under evacuation. This is crazy. It seems like this one is as bad if not worse than the last one.

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