No fewer than 10 people have been killed in a spate of wildfires fanned by strong winds in northern California’s wine country.
The wildfires which started Sunday also destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses and chased some 20,000 people from their dwellings.
Thousands of firefighters battled wind gusts in excess of 50 miles per hour (80 km/h) that rapidly spread 15 separate wildfires across some 73,000 acres, according to CalFire spokesman Daniel Berlant.
About 1,500 homes and commercial buildings have been destroyed throughout the region, Ken Pimlott, director of CalFire, said at a news conference.
Two hospitals were forced to evacuate in Sonoma County, state officials said.
A separate wildfire on Monday torched at least a half-dozen homes in the affluent Anaheim Hills neighborhood of Southern California’s Orange County, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents there, authorities said.
That blaze erupted along a freeway off-ramp and spread quickly in gusty winds to scorch some 5,000 acres (1,600 hectares) in a matter of hours, fire officials said.
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The fatalities brought the official wildfire-related death toll in California this year to 13 and represented the greatest loss of civilian life from a single cluster of blazes in the state in a decade, state fire officials said.
Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for Napa, Sonoma and Yuba counties, encompassing some of the state’s prime wine-making areas, as the blazes raged unchecked and engulfed the region in thick, billowing smoke that drifted south into the San Francisco Bay area.
He later extended the declaration to include four more northern California counties and Orange County in Southern California, and requested a U.S. presidential disaster declaration to support state and local firefighting resources.
Sonoma County bore the brunt of the fatalities, with seven fire-related deaths confirmed there, according to the sheriff’s department. Two others died in Napa County and one more in Mendocino County, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire).
Details of those deaths were not immediately available from state or local officials. But KGO-TV in San Francisco, citing unnamed California Highway Patrol sources, described one victim as a blind, elderly woman found dead in the driveway of her home in Santa Rosa, a town in Sonoma County.
Brad Alexander, a spokesman for the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said the death toll could climb higher.
The current tally constituted 10-year record for civilian wildfire fatalities in the state, dating back to 14 who lost their lives in a series of blazes that swept San Diego County and other parts of Southern California in October 2007, according to CalFire spokeswoman Janet Upton.
