Cynthia MacLiesh and her neighbors in the Lake Park neighborhood of the town of Napa planned to spend the night awake and alert, their eyes on the angry red clouds of smoke and fire surging just beyond a hillside less than a mile to the east of their homes.
"We're all packed up, ready to leave," she said as she and her neighbors stood in the park that gives their neighborhood its name, watching the ominous glow on the other side of the ridge.
"I was out here an hour ago and there wasn't anything there. Now you can tell the whole thing's on fire," she said at 8 p.m. "We're just going to be ready."Monday night about half of this wine country town was dark from power outages caused by the more than a dozen wildfires burning in the area, though MacLiesh's street still had light. "I just keep listening to the radio and waiting to see if we have to go," she said.
She was one of tens of thousands on edge, waiting to see where the fires that have caused devastation across the oak-and vine-dotted hills of the area north of San Francisco.Ten people are confirmed dead and at least 100 injured in wind-whipped fires that came up seemingly out of nowhere in the early hours of Monday morning, rousting thousands of out their beds to flee down country roads, away from the swirling smoke and flames that engulfed entire blocks at a time, fueled by the hot, dry Santa Ana winds.
More than 1,500 homes and businesses burned Monday and more were burning overnight, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Millions of Americans have visited the wine country and the hundreds of vineyards and wineries in Napa and Sonoma counties. Driving through the area on Monday was nothing like a vacation, however.
The smell of smoke was heavy even coming up from Sausalito in Marin county. Once in Sonoma, entire hillsides were black from the grass fires that have swept the area, though cows continued to graze on the small patches of unburned grass.Burned-out structures were clearly visible from the road, some with charred boards still smoking. On the hillsides, scorched and blackened vineyards, worth as much as $400,000 per acre, were interspersed with untouched areas.
In nearby towns including Santa Rosa and Rohnert Park, hundreds of homes were utterly destroyed in a the fires that raged through and in some areas continued to burn uncontrolled.
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