Kincade fire containment grows to 65% as most evacuees return home

Firefighters have reached 65% containment on the massive Kincade fire, a rapid turnabout from what just days ago was a potential catastrophe, with the wildfire menacing population centers like Windsor and north Santa Rosa during large-scale blackouts and evacuations affecting more than a third of Sonoma County's residents.

Though fire crews are still shoring up containment lines and snuffing out hot spots within the wildfire's 121-square-mile footprint, gains on the fire lines have allowed incident commanders to begin releasing some of the personnel from around the West Coast who coalesced to battle the blaze. Five thousand firefighters remained attached to the Kincade fire on Thursday evening, down from the peak of 5,245 reached Wednesday.

PG&E, which had cut power preemptively to 87,000 county customers in anticipation of the same extreme winds that threatened to drive flames across containment lines Tuesday night and early Wednesday, had restored most electrical service by late Thursday, representatives said.

In a region shrouded with smoke and pulsing with distress just three days earlier, firefighters Thursday were greeted by honking horns and calls of “Thank you,” heroes once again to a grateful community all too aware of the destruction averted by the collective toil.

That's not how they see it.

“We love our work,” said Monterey County Regional Fire Capt. Eric Hanzelka, part of a 19-member strike force that was treated to lunch at La Rosa in Santa Rosa on Thursday and has felt the public's gratitude since the moment they arrived. “We're just doing our job.”

The group had been sent to Sonoma County to be “prepositioned” in advance of a major windstorm that helped spark the Kincade fire Oct. 23 near the Geysers steamfield, from which it quickly spread toward Geyserville, eventually charring what's now 77,758 acres and destroying 349 structures, including 165 homes.

Owners of some of the lost homes were officially allowed back to inspect their property for the first time Thursday, accompanied by public safety officials.

At the sprawling base camp that has taken over the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, Cal Fire Public Information Officer Jay Tracy said it had been an emotional day, escorting several people home to the ashes that remained of their burned homes.

He recalled one woman in particular whose eyes welled up as she said simply, “I don't think I can do this.”

“They have this barn that looks like you could have a sunny day and it would ignite, and it's unscathed,” Tracy said. “Really draining day today.”

Elsewhere, life began to resemble something like normal for many locals, but there remained thousands still enduring painful upheaval - among them 5,788 people still under mandatory evacuation orders.

Thousands also faced near-freezing nighttime temperatures with no way to heat their homes because their gas service remained cut off by PG&E.

Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Essick said while most of the 186,000 people evacuated during the peak period of fire activity last weekend and early this week had been permitted to return home by Wednesday, allowing those who live closer to the fire zone - areas north of Geyserville and the Mark West Creek area north of St. Helena Road, for example - “is going to be a slower process.”

“There are many hazards out there,” including downed power lines and trees, work crews clearing roads, and utility companies working to restore power and gas, Essick said in a video posted to Facebook.

So there are “no timelines” for lifting the remaining evacuation orders, he said. “We're doing it as quickly as possible. We want to get you home, but we want to get you home safely.”

In addition, even as PG&E worked toward restoring electrical service to its users - some of whom had been without power since Saturday - more than 20,000 customers once thought to be in the path of the Kincade fire still had no gas service Thursday. They were located principally in the north county communities of Cloverdale, Geyserville, Healdsburg, Windsor and Larkfield-Wikiup, as well as inland west county areas like Forestville, Graton and Sebastopol, where gas service had been interrupted as a precaution when the wildfire was at its most menacing.

About 3,000 customers had their gas service restored by Thursday evening, but some were expected to have to wait until as late as Monday to meet up with repair crews to have their lines inspected for safety and their pilot lights relit safely, PG&E representatives said.

West County Supervisor Lynda Hopkins chastised the utility company for turning off natural gas to so many county residents without any warning or notification to government officials, particularly when many or most also would have had their power out.

In her district, which spans from southwest Santa Rosa to the Sonoma Coast, the loss of commercial power also affected telecom signals, she said, and the trifecta of impacts has caused many residents to delay their return home.

“To just make these large-scale de-energization decisions, to not have sufficient battery backup or generator power for telecommunications systems - people's lives are on the line,” Hopkins said. “If we had another fire start in west county in the midst of this disaster, with communications systems down throughout the county, people would have been sitting ducks.”

Forestville residents Ron Phelps and Cindy King, both 70, were among the lucky ones who had gas service restored Thursday, moments after returning home from El Dorado Hills near Sacramento, the last stop after two evacuations and, before that, a spell in Santa Clara, where King had major abdominal surgery.

The couple were just unloading their car Thursday when a utility truck parked in front of their home.

Phelps, a beer in his hand, couldn't stifle his smile. “We're not going anywhere,” he said with a laugh. “Well, I might have to go to the store to get more beer.”

Across the county, in Oakmont, Donna Perlman, also 70, checked on a neighbor whose simple request was some boiling water for a warm bath.

Perlman and her husband had purchased a generator after an earlier preemptive power outage that allowed her to offer her assistance.

“Little things like that, they (PG&E) forget about,” she said.

PG&E President and chief executive Bill Johnson acknowledged Thursday at a news conference that “these events have not been entirely popular.”

“No one likes them, including the 20-plus- thousand people that work at PG&E,” he said. “But we've done them for one reason, and that is to prevent the devastating loss of life and widespread property damage that we've seen in recent years, when sparks from electric equipment turn into catastrophic wildfire. We've done this for public safety.”

Mark Quinlan, PG&E's director of wildfire operations, said patrol crews had located 156 confirmed instances of equipment damage that could have ignited a wildfire in the 34-county area affected by the latest preemptive shutdown. They included broken power poles, trees blown into or tangled in power lines, debris in wires and other problems that, had the equipment been energized, could have ignited catastrophic wildfires. Another 241 cases of damage are under review.

“All of these potential hazards, these real hazards that we're finding, could have been potential fire ignitions, and that's important to understand,” Quinlan said, “and really is the foundation of why we have a (shut-off) program in the first place.”

But many, up to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, have been critical of the program, claiming the investor-owned utility has failed for years to invest adequately in fire prevention measures like infrastructure hardening, vegetation management and the like.

Perlman was among them.

“They had every opportunity to make it right,” she said before her power was restored at 3 p.m. Thursday. “I honestly feel we're paying the price for their mistake. I mean, we are, by being shut down.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB. Reach Staff Writer Yousef Baig at 707-521-5390 or yousef.baig@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @YousefBaig.