Wildfires have forced Californians from their homes and into evacuation shelters, but the pandemic is complicating efforts to safely feed and house evacuees. At one evacuation site at the fairgrounds in Santa Cruz, workers set up a dozen large tents inside a large warehouse-like building, with each tent spaced six feet apart. Site organizers, wearing protective masks and gloves, took evacuees’ temperature once they were allowed inside the shelter, reported the Mercury News. In years past, dozens of cots would have been lined up just a couple feet apart. But things have changed, said one rescue worker: “You can’t do that in Covid and expect a pure result,” he said. Elsewhere, in Sonoma county, officials raced to establish a separate evacuation center for anyone with symptoms of Covid-19. And a number of sites are hustling to secure hotel rooms to house the recently displaced. “Go where you can congregate with the smallest amount of people you can – that would be preferable,” one Stanford doctor said. “It’s not going to be ideal no what matter what we do.” -Mario Koran A helicopter involved in the fight against fires has crashed south-west of Fresno, in California’s Central Valley, sparking a separate brush fire. The Federal Aviation Administration said the crash happened around 11am. Rescue teams entered the rugged terrain to search for survivors, but the conditions of those aboard remains unclear. – Mario Koran Fires burning in all but one of the nine counties surrounding the San Francisco Bay area has created the worst air quality in the world. An air quality map from the San Francisco Chronicle shows fires that are ringing the metro area and the poor air that’s settled over the region. So what does poor air quality mean for people recovering from Covid-19? “People are already worried about catching the virus and becoming ill. Having respiratory problems and other problems, and then having a natural disaster to deal with or multiple fires going on during fire season is not pleasant,” Vinayak Jha, a San Francisco pulmonologist, told the Chronicle. Breathing in wildfire smoke can cause shortness of breath, coughing and sore throat and could exacerbate symptoms of Covid-19, he said. Wildfire smoke is like tobacco smoke without the nicotine, said a professor of medicine and environmental health sciences. When burned, it produces carbon particles with toxic hydrocarbons. When inhaled, the fine particles make it deep into the lungs, causing inflammation. The condition has been found in the lungs of firefighters. The closer someone is to the fire, the more risk of inflammation. A growing number of reports emerging from China, Europe and the US suggest that poor air quality is associated with increased Covid cases and deaths, Jha said. -Mario Koran Evacuee tells of terrifying escape from Vacaville: ‘The sky was just orange’ Terilyn Steverson, 28, felt helpless much of Wednesday as she waited to hear about the fate of the Vacaville home she grew up in – a home that has been in her family since the 1970s. She and her sister currently live about an hour away, but their uncle, who has mental disabilities and requires care, still lives in the house. Steverson and her sister had planned on staying with him to keep him company until the fires passed – instead, Steverson woke up at 3am to multiple phone calls from friends in Vacaville, telling her about the mandatory evacuation. “I called him to tell him we’re coming to get you and I couldn’t get a hold of him for 10 minutes,” she said.“It was literally the longest, scariest 10 minutes of my life.” He had left with a neighbor, bringing with him a change of clothes and some personal belongings. Steverson and her sister hopped in the car and rushed to pick him up from another friend’s home in Vacaville, driving straight into a hellscape. “At three, four in the morning, the sky was just orange,” she said. “There was just this glow of orange and red. We hit Vallejo and there’s this light ash falling from the sky. We get closer and closer and the closer we get to Vacaville, the thicker the smoke is and the thicker the ash is that is falling from the sky. It was so scary.” Steverson and her sister weren’t allowed back into the neighborhood to pick up any possessions of sentimental value from their family home. But all that mattered to them was getting their uncle and getting to safety. What’s been harder, she said, was not being able to lean into her community in the face of this disaster. When she picked her uncle up at her friend’s house, she couldn’t hug her friend or comfort her friend in the way she normally would have without the threat of coronavirus. “In times of crisis you find out that the community you built is even more important than you thought and really connected,” she said. “And it’s just weird that we can’t be there to support each other at this time. We just wouldn’t be able to do the things that are so naturally human.” Having grown up in Vacaville, Steverson had always been ready in case of evacuation with a “go bag”. She asked that others in California be prepared and have a bag ready to grab and go in case the need to evacuate should arise, whether because of a wildfire or an earthquake. “Every year we have fire season. Every year they say we might have to evacuate. But it’s never been to a point where it’s 3 am and everybody has to get out of the house right now, get all your stuff, go go go,” she said. “It’s just been really surreal.” – Vivian Ho How did we get here? Maanvi Singh reports: A bout of unusual, extreme weather has spawned many of the fires raging across California today. First came the heat, which scorched through the west starting this past weekend, bringing record-breaking temperatures. Then, a tropical storm off the coast of Mexico brought in humidity, and a thunderstorm more than a thousand miles south of the Bay Area brought in moisture and created ripples of pressure that triggered thunder and lightning across swathes of northern and central California. High winds stoked flames ignited by the lightning – and helped them quickly spread across hundreds of acres. “In once case, I saw footage of lightning strike a bush – and then that became the Hennessy fire,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. A particularly dry winter and spring had dried out brush and vegetation fueling many of the fires. “Now the fires are also burning through coast redwoods, through tense forest that would be normally pretty damp still this time of year,” Swain told the Guardian – noting that the recent heatwave, and the dry months that preceded it have primed the state’s forests to burn. Firefighters are in short supply in California as the state continues to face hundreds of fast-spreading blazes. Nearly 7,000 firefighters are currently on the frontlines fighting the fires, but it isn’t enough: agencies have requested 375 fire engines from neighboring states. Arizona and Nevada have sent equipment to California and Texas has offered to send firefighting crews, Governor Gavin Newsom said in a press conference on Wednesday. “We are experiencing fires the likes of which we haven’t seen in many, many years,” Newsom said. “That is a resource challenge where they are stretched in ways where we haven’t seen in the last few years.” The difficult job is made even harder this year by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Many of the incarcerated laborers relied upon to fight fires are out of commission due to outbreaks in prisons across the state. Prisoners are crucial in the state’s fire response plan, fighting fires in exchange for wages as low as $2 per hour and reduced sentences. Non-incarcerated firefighters who are able to work risk contracting Covid-19 themselves. Most firefighters stay in makeshift communities near the hot zones, sleeping close together. A Covid-19 outbreak could quickly sweep through such camps, and exposure to wildfire smoke can worsen Covid-19 symptoms and outcomes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and prevention. Covid-19 outbreaks affecting firefighters could easily threaten the firefighting mission, according to a study published by researchers at Colorado State University and the US Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station. “If simultaneous fires incurred outbreaks, the entire wildland response system could be stressed substantially, with a large portion of the workforce quarantined,” the study’s authors wrote, suggesting social distancing and screening measures in the camps. - Kari Paul Maanvi Singh reports: Last night the sky over Vacaville, California, was glowing red, and clouds of smoke had been raining ash down Valerie Arbelaez Brown’s street. So when a neighbor knocked on her door at 4.30am, urging her to evacuate, she told her four kids to grab their most precious possessions – “the things money can’t buy” – and tucked the whole family into the car. The fires in Vacaville have been moving so quickly that police and fire crews began knocking on doors at dawn, asking residents to evacuate as fast as possible. Arbelaez Brown, who had worked as a disaster relief responder for the Red Cross, said she’d been trained to keep her wits about her amid crisis. But she said even she was shaken by how fierce the fire was. She and her husband returned to their home after dropping their kids off with a family member who lives near Sacramento, away from the fire’s immediate path. “We wanted to grab a few more things and we could see – the fire was right there,” she told the Guardian. “It was like, a five-minute walk away – in the hills where my kids and I normally go biking.” Now she’s sheltering with family – and she’s not sure if her house will survive. “The fire was moving so fast – and it was engulfing everything around us,” she said. “My 14-year-old was freaking out, crying. But I explained to the kids we can replace things, we can rebuild the house. As long as we’re safe.” LNU Lightning Complex fire north-east of San Francisco burns more than 45,000 acres Residents of Vacaville, just north east of San Francisco, are in shock after a 46,225-acre fire ripped through their community overnight, forcing them out of their homes. The blaze, called the LNU Lightning Complex fire, is a cluster of 20 fires that has ravaged Napa, Sonoma and Solano counties in California’s wine country. “I was running around in circles,” one resident, Danyel Conolley, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I couldn’t piece together a rational thought. I forgot to pack a lot of things. I forgot my deodorant. I wish I remembered my deodorant.” Further west, in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties, a blaze dubbed the CZU August Lightning Complex, has already burned 10,000 acres and is 0% contained, according to Cal-Fire. Time lapse imagery shows the progression of the explosive fire. Officials urge residents to conserve power With temperatures soaring and millions of Californians attempting to work from home, power officials are asking residents to conserve power in hopes of avoiding further power outages. The California Independent System Operator, which runs the electric grid for most of the state, is asking people to set air conditioners at 78 degrees, avoid fans and appliances, and unplug unused devices between the hours of 2pm to 9pm. Last night, Cal-ISO cancelled planned power outages, crediting power conservation efforts across the state. Today, it’s asking residents to match yesterday’s efforts. The heat and rolling blackouts will impact communities unevenly. Asked by a reporter what support he can offer low-income residents threatened by Covid, heat and outages at once, Newsom said officials are moving fast to establish cooling centers where residents can find reprieve from the heat. - Mario Koran Officials expand evacuation orders as fires burn out of control Three wildfires and more than 10,000 acres are currently burning out of control around the San Francisco Bay Area, prompting officials to issue evacuation orders for residents living near the blazes. Gavin Newsom, the state governor, said today that he has asked three states – Arizona, Nevada and Texas – to provide hundreds of fire engines to help contain the flames. Evacuation orders are also coming down for residents in Glenn and Tehama counties, north of the Bay Area. – Mario Koran Wildfires in northern California have made the air quality in the San Francisco Bay Area the worst in the world. As fires blaze through eight of the nine counties surrounding San Francisco, smoke is drifting across the region and light ash falls from the sky. The American Lung Association is urging resident to take greater caution, saying the poor air quality could exacerbate breathing problems for people who at-risk of contracting Covid-19. “The combination of uncontained wildfires and extreme heat has created conditions that put even healthy individuals at risk,” Afif El-Hasan, an association spokesman told the Los Angeles Times. “The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic only makes these potential effects more serious.” Intense smoke and heat trigger coughing, wheezing, worsen lung function and lead to bronchitis or even death, he added. Bandanas and most cloth masks may provide some protection against infection, but they don’t protect against particulate matter from the smoke, said Erin DeMerritt, the spokeswoman for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Here’s a round-up of some of the most striking images so far as California battles numerous wildfires up and down the state. As fires burn across the state, from Eureka to the outskirts of Los Angeles, Cal Fire has a simple and urgent message for Californians: pack your bags and be ready to go. “My recommendation is that all the citizens in California be ready to go if there is a wildfire,” the Cal Fire spokeswoman Lynnette Round told the Mercury News. “Residents have to have their bags packed up with your nose facing out your driveway so you can leave quickly. Everybody should be ready to go, especially if you’re in a wildfire area.” Californians understand too well that the urgency is not overstated. Almost two years ago, the Camp fire that broke out in northern California became the deadliest and most destructive fire on record. Roughly 153,000 acres were burned, 18,800 structures destroyed and 85 people killed in that case. Terrifying scenes posted on social media provide just a glimpse of what it looks like to drive through areas within such a blaze.