Zachary Handl pleaded with law enforcement for just a half-hour to go get his belongings — his “show” guitar, the custom-tailored suit, his late grandmother’s sketches. He had been away, camping.
The official blocking the road to Ben Lomond was firm, though, Handl said. The fire was too close. No one was getting in.
On Sunday, the 36-year-old had heard that his neighborhood was intact. But he was watching the weather.
“It’s kind of a waiting game right now,” he said. “Because even — whether or not my house or either of my parents’ houses are still there … with this next round of thunderstorms … they might not be.”
Californians are bracing for more lightning that could spark ferocious new blazes, as wildfires nearing record size continue to burn largely uncontained. In little more than a week, storms have set off hundreds of fires and given rise to the second- and third-largest blazes in California’s history. More than 1.1 million acres have burned since Aug. 15, according to the state firefighting agency, Cal Fire, making the fires’ footprint larger than Rhode Island.
Thunderstorms are anticipated Sunday and Monday as moisture from what was once Hurricane Genevieve streams northeastward, where it will encounter intense August heat over central and northern California. The storms are expected to produce lightning strikes but little rain, which, given the extremely dry vegetation at the tail end of the summer dry season, is capable of touching off new fires.
Nick Nauslar, a meteorologist with the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, which coordinates firefighting efforts nationwide, tweeted early Sunday morning that if numerous storms form, they could ignite “hundreds of new fires.” With fire crews already stretched thin and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) appealing for help from other states as well as Canada and Australia, this could overwhelm the more than 13,000 firefighters currently on duty.
Red Flag warnings are in effect for the entire San Francisco Bay area northward to Sacramento. These warnings stretch all the way to the Oregon border, including some areas that have not been hit hard by the latest blazes, which have burned nearly 1 million acres in just a week.
In a typical entire wildfire season, California sees a little more than 300,000 acres burned.
Handl says he watched the thunderstorms last week while camping and thought they were “beautiful.” Then, he heard about the fires. He cut his trip short and drove back to Ben Lomond, a community of roughly 7,000 about 10 miles north of Santa Cruz.
The roads down from Tahoe were clogged with evacuees from the Vacaville area, he said. He inched forward for hours, passing people hosing off their roofs and packing their cars as ash fell from the sky. Turned away from his place in Ben Lomond, he said, he stayed at first with friends in Santa Cruz, but the smoke there was so oppressive that he and his hosts both decided to leave town.
Handl says that “there’s no point in getting frustrated” about not being able to retrieve his most precious belongings. He does not want to endanger himself and firefighters.
He is still angry, however, about the fire seasons that ravage California year after year. He knows the latest blazes stem from a “crazy weather event” — a “siege” of lightning, officials have said — but he wants more resources poured into firefighting, fire prevention and the climate change linked to wildfires’ growing threat.
“This has been like an annual event. This fire season across the state,” he said. “We’ve had an opportunity to see what’s coming.”
  • The LNU Complex Fire had burned 341,243 acres, mainly in Sonoma, Napa and Lake counties, destroying 845 structures and killing 4. The fire was just 17 percent contained, and ranks as the second-largest blaze in state history.
  • As of Sunday morning, the SCU Complex Fire was 339,968 acres, having destroyed five structures and threatening 20,000 others. It was just 10 percent contained. The fire is the third-largest in California history and is burning in Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties.
  • Nine of the 10 largest California wildfires have occurred since 2003, but many of them reached their size more gradually than the current blazes, which spread with a speed and ferocity that even veteran firefighters had not witnessed.
The two wildfires currently burning in northern California are now the second and third largest fires in state history.
Many of the ongoing wildfires began when a record-breaking heat wave and rare outbreak of thunderstorms produced more than 20,000 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes across the highly populated San Francisco Bay area in particular early last week. The resulting fires — and “complexes” of many small fires — have merged into historic conflagrations in parts of the state.
According to the National Weather Service forecast office in San Francisco, the threat for new thunderstorms is highest from Sunday afternoon local time through Monday morning.
In addition to igniting new fires, these storms could cause “gusty, erratic winds which may create dangerous and unpredictable fire behavior on the current wildfires,” the Weather Service wrote.
California has seen a significant uptick in large-wildfire activity because of a combination of climate change, land-use practices and other factors. Large fires have also increased across other parts of the West, which climate studies tie to human-caused climate change that alters the timing of precipitation, makes summers hotter and vegetation drier, and leads to more days with extreme weather that enables fires to spread rapidly.
The fires have prompted the evacuation of more than 100,000 and fouled the air quality across California and as far downwind as the Midwest.

Extreme heat, lightning and long-term, human-caused climate change

Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland on Aug. 16.
Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland on Aug. 16. (Noah Berger/AP)
The massive fires burning were also touched off by a thunderstorm outbreak that had a connection to a tropical weather system off the Pacific coast, which occurred a week ago.
These extreme weather events are set against the backdrop of human-caused climate change, which is causing more-frequent and severe heat waves in the region as well as larger wildfires across the West.
Studies show that climate change is lengthening the fire season and leading to larger blazes than would otherwise occur. The 2018 National Climate Assessment, published by the Trump administration, projected that those trends are likely to continue for several decades.
The immediate trigger of most of the more than two dozen large fires burning in the Bay Area was an unusual August thunderstorm outbreak, which lighted up the night skies above San Francisco on Sunday and Monday and moved inland, where lightning discharges struck trees and grass at a time of year when vegetation is at its driest.
Between midnight Saturday and midnight Wednesday, there were 20,203 cloud-to-ground strikes in California, according to Chris Vagasky of the company Vaisala, which operates the National Lightning Detection Network. The total number of lightning discharges, which includes lightning that jumped from cloud to cloud without hitting the ground, was equivalent to 11 percent of California’s average annual lightning activity, he said in a Twitter message.
The storms were the result of moisture moving north from now-dissipated Tropical Storm Fausto near the Baja Peninsula and the sizzling heat across the state.
The long-lasting and intense heat wave has played a key role in these blazes. Multiple monthly heat records have been set in the past 10 days, including in Death Valley, Calif., where one of the hottest temperatures on Earth, a high of 130 degrees on Sunday, was recorded.
Temperatures on Sunday and Monday are expected to be above average across the Red Flag warning area, but not nearly as high as they were during the last round of storms.