Tuesday update: Wine Country wildfires continue to rage, thousands of homes threatened

Thousands of people remain evacuated Tuesday morning as a series of firestorms continue to rage across the state’s bucolic wine country, blazes that have resulted in at least 10 deaths and destroyed more than 1,500 structures.

Tuesday morning, officials also reported an 11th death stemming from one of the fourteen different fires burning throughout Northern California. Evacuations remain in effect Tuesday for parts of Sonoma and Napa counties. California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Director Ken Pimlott said an estimated 20,000 people had been evacuated. He cautioned that the estimate of burned structures — the fifth highest ever from a group of California wildfires — was very conservative and said firefighters were too busy trying to save lives to focus on battling the blazes. Meanwhile, TV stations streamed images of devastated neighborhoods where every home had seemingly melted away.

he two largest fires were the Atlas fire south of Lake Berryessa, which was burning as many as 25,000 acres by Monday evening, and the Tubbs fire, a 27,000-acre blaze that spread from Calistoga to Santa Rosa in Sonoma County, jumping Highway 101, and prompting police to completely shut down that major thoroughfare.

Tuesday morning, several thousand homes remained threatened by the wildfires. In Sonoma County, there are 24 evacuation centers open as of Tuesday morning.

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