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Ferocious wildfires. Triple-digit wind gusts. A hundred-thousand residents forced from their homes. Two million without power. Just another October Sunday in Northern California?
Faced with a warming climate and an aging infrastructure, Californians are conceding that this may be the “new normal.”
But the chaos was compounded on Sunday when Bay Area residents lost even the most basic public services. In a global hotspot of innovation and technology, we cooked on propane stoves in Silicon Valley, shut down interstates in the North Bay, and panicked when cell-phones dropped with loved ones in danger.
“So many of our plans are based on the assumption that the infrastructure works,” said Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Palo Alto-based Institute for the Future. “We can’t make that basic assumption any more.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a statewide emergency Sunday as large wildfires raged and extreme winds forced mass evacuations from fire prone regions at both ends of the state. And throughout Sunday, a series of smaller fires across the Bay Area brought the flames, fleeing residents and road closures closer to home.
Meanwhile, residents – even far from the fires – confronted a very different set of problems.
In an economic powerhouse and place of global influence and ambition, the Bay Area’s old and sick could not get reliable information about power shutoffs on Sunday, because PG&E’s public safety website was down almost all of the day.
Major transportation arteries were clogged. Soccer games were cancelled; church services were postponed. Toxic air drifted across parks and playgrounds.
In rural areas, many customers reported that AT&T, Verizon, Frontier Communications and other cell phone services were down. Voice service worked for some, but not data. Others had data but no voice service. Comcast internet slowed, or went down altogether in some spots.
Residents who use well water, dependent on power, worked to fill buckets and jugs for their homes and troughs for thirsty livestock.
Not even a beloved amusement park felt secure.
Late Saturday night, frightened by reports of an active shooter that created pandemonium at Great America, Sanjay Khandelwal of Los Gatos tried to call his daughter who was there as park-goers fled for safety with a police helicopter circling above.
“All of a sudden, my cell signal dropped. I couldn’t talk to her, I couldn’t get texts,” he said on Sunday, feeling helpless but later thankful that she was safe and that the chaos — fueled by a mistaken report — turned out to be a robbery instead.
“Here we are in Silicon Valley — the creator of all this terrific stuff used all around the world, the center of technology — and we’re having to deal with basic communication failure,” said Khandelwal, an executive at a private education company. “We have made our lives so dependent on these things.”
Sonoma County’s Kincade fire is just the latest California inferno to be fueled by autumn’s wind, low humidity and accumulated dry fuels. At 8 a.m. on a 3,300 foot ridge north of Healdsburg, wind gusts reached 102 miles per hour. The winds and chaotic fire led authorities in Sonoma County to order the evacuation of more than 180,000 residents.
“This is a nightmare,” said Colleen Thill, as she fled her home in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park, which was destroyed in the 2017 Tubbs Fire. “It feels just like two years ago. It’s some nice PTSD.”
Like other fires, it may be linked to electrical transmission lines. Late Thursday, PG&E said it had become aware that a “transmission-level outage” occurred in the area around the time the fire began.
The traffic apocalypse is also familiar. Thousands fleeing the Kincade fire faced heavy traffic and long gas lines in the North Bay, as authorities closed Highway 101 from Windsor to Healdsburg. A 150-acre fire in Vallejo shut down a section of Interstate 80 in both directions Sunday afternoon, snarling traffic in the East Bay.
But that was only part of the frenzy of fires. A wildfire in Crockett also closed I-80, as well as the Cummings Skyway. Four fires in Eastern Contra Costa County forced brief evacuations. There were more blazes in Martinez and Milpitas. And fires burned on both sides of Highway 24, west of Interstate 680.
In Berkeley and Concord, large, uprooted trees blocked multiple roadways.
Even the blackouts triggered a sense of deja vu, as PG&E turned off power to more than 2 million Californians across 38 counties in northern and central California.
In Santa Cruz, Rob Irion heated up pots of water on the gas stove for sponge baths in the tub. In Moss Beach, Katrina Deane kept her phone alive with a solar USB charger. At Half Moon Bay’s Holy Family Episcopal Church, the Rev. Julia McKeon said they played tambourines instead of the organ.
Santa Rosa resident Jessica Cole, experiencing her third blackout in a month, offered this advice: “Cold coffee is still coffee. Treat dead traffic signals as four-way stop signs. Keep calm and carry a flashlight.” With winds fiercer than last year’s, “I am grateful to PG&E for turning off the grid so there is just that one fire threatening rather than fires from all sides,” she said. “And I appreciate PG&E and the county giving advance warning of the shut offs, so I have time to charge devices, get gas and eat up the frozen food.”
San Mateo’s Bruce Li, an expert in mobile wireless and software, built a cardboard and aluminum foil antenna to watch Sunday football over the air. In Cupertino, home of Apple, Jim Cunningham planned to cook dinner on a propane grill.
“Sadly, nothing that has happened in the last 48 hours was a surprise,” said Steven Weissman, a former administrative law judge for the California Public Utility Commission and a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.
“We know there will be more wildfires, and they will continue to be very severe. We know the utilities will continue to be implicated in some fraction of these wildfires,” he said.
As we endure more and more of these events, it is essential to find alternatives to a utility service that does not reliably provide power when customers need it, Weissman said. He hoped the crises would inspire change in the nation’s most diverse state and the world’s fifth-biggest economy, home to one in eight Americans.
“We saw this coming, and we have failed to act at every level,” said Gorbis, of the Institute for the Future, a forecasting and research nonprofit organization.
“This shows us the dangers of ‘short-term thinking,'” because we have not responded to the abundant signs of a changing climate, she said. “I don’t blame California. Failing to act is a global problem. But right now, California is paying the price.”
Staff writer Casey Tolan contributed to this report.
