California Wine Country devastated by Fire

California’s Wine country was shrouded in a thick layer of smoky haze here on Tuesday as fire-fighters continued to battle wildfires that have left at least 15 people dead and damaged or destroyed more than 2,000 structures, including wineries, homes and resorts.

State fire officials estimated that 17 separate fires, the first group of which began Sunday night, had burned about 115,000 acres over eight counties. More than 100 people had been taken to hospitals by Tuesday morning, and officials said that the number of the dead and injured was likely to rise further.

The fires are a part of an outbreak of blazes stretching almost the entire length of the state. According to a Report in NY Times the death toll has risen to 15 people confirmed dead, but the State and local officials have warned that with many people still missing and unaccounted for, and some areas still out of reach of emergency crews, those figures are almost certain to rise.

The two biggest and most destructive fires affected over 52,000 acres in Napa and Sonoma Counties. The 80 km/hour winds, threatening cities like Santa Rosa, Napa and Calistoga died down on Tuesday, but it’s feared that they may pick up again later in the week. Chief Ken Pimlott of Cal Fire, the state’s fire fighting agency reportedly has described these two fires as “zero percent contained.”

Governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency in parts of California where the fires have “damaged critical infrastructure, threatened thousands of homes and caused the evacuation of residents.”

Ann Petersen of the Wine Growers Association of Dry Creek Valley in fire-affected Sonoma County said the damage appeared to have hit residential areas harder than vineyards. “I think we are going to see a lot more residential losses than vineyard losses,” she said, adding that many of the people who worked in the wine industry live in the city.

The damage seems to be more in the residential areas than the vineyards as most of the crops have been already harvested. For instance, Treasury Wine Estate (TWE) which has about 3,750 planted hA of vineyards in the US, including in the fire-hit Sonoma County and Napa Valley, owns Beringer Vineyards, Stags’ Leap Winery and the Sterling Vineyards in the Napa Valley, and Chateau St Jean in the Sonoma Valley. In an official statement the company said “at this stage, TWE confirms that the majority of our vintage has been picked – there remains just over 10 per cent of our total vintage to be picked in Napa and Sonoma.”

Cakebread Cellar in Rutherford Napa Valley who is represented in India by Brindco has not suffered any loss of harvest but has other issues. Bruce Cakebread, CEO tells delWine, ' ​​Our main concern is for our employees who have been impacted by the fires who live up in Calistoga and Santa Rosa at this time. We finished harvest last week so all the grapes are in. The winery cellar is operating as we have power and water now.The vineyards are not impacted at this time but weather is calling for higher winds this afternoon so that may change. It is like having 3 or 4 major fires all happening at once, never seen anything like this.'

It would take weeks to determine the spark that touched off each of the firestorms that have destroyed majority of a dozen California communities. But the consensus in the scientific community is that the conditions for the calamity were created by humans over a period of time. Decades of aggressive fire-fighting left too much fuel on the ground. Moreover, more than a century of carbon emissions aggravated the drought and the record high temperatures in the State, that baked brush and timber to an explosive dryness.

The damage from the wind-driven flames is also more grievous because of another man-made initiative- building more and more homes in hilly communities adjacent to brush and woodlands, according to NBC

“It’s very clear that the increasingly hot summers are the product of climate change,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “And it’s clear that human influence has an impact on the climate system in the American West and more broadly. That increases the risk of fire and the overall acreage burned when we get these conditions. Fires that would have once leapt from tree to tree and ridge to ridge now increasingly bound across rooftops and from one subdivision to the next. “With all this vegetation in what is known as the wildland-urban interface, it can be particularly dangerous,” Swain reportedly said.

Undoubtedly many theories would be forwarded and the reasons analysed by the media and the others but one hopes and prays that further losses and damages are minimised, there is no more loss of any human lives and those who have suffered would be duly compensated by the State  

Subhash Arora

Source- Various media sources duly acknowledged

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