This article is more than 10 months old

This article is more than 10 months old

Tens of thousands in California were ordered to evacuate their homes on Thursday as wildfires raged in the north and south, after dry, windy weather prompted the state’s utility companies to impose sweeping electrical blackouts.

More than 50,000 people in southern California were ordered to evacuate late on Thursday as wildfires burned north of Los Angeles. Several homes burned as two fires fanned by powerful winds swept through dry brush to the edge of communities in the Santa Clarita area. No injuries were immediately reported, and the largest fire remained uncontained.

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The punishing Santa Ana winds that fueled the fire were expected to last through Friday, and could prompt more power shutoffs to hundreds of thousands of people.

In northern California, a fire near the wine country town of Geyserville burned 49 buildings. Whipped up by strong winds, the Kincade fire forced nearly 2,000 people in and around Geyserville, a small town and popular destination for tourists, to evacuate. By Friday morning, the fire spanned 25 sq miles, and was 5% contained.

Although the cause of the fire has yet to officially be confirmed, Pacific Gas & Electric said it had a problem with a transmission tower near where the Kincade fire ignited. The company filed a report with the state utilities commission on Thursday, saying it had become aware of a transmission-level outage in the Geysers region in Sonoma county at 9.20pm on Wednesday.

The wildfire was reported minutes later in the same area. PG&E’s chief executive, Bill Johnson, said it was too soon to know if the faulty equipment started the fire. He said the tower had been inspected four times in the past two years and appeared to have been in “excellent condition”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Flames erupt during the Kincade fire near Geyserville. Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

Dangerous weather conditions prompted electrical shutoffs as PG&E, whose power lines have been found responsible for sparking previous deadly wildfires, and Southern California Edison sought to avoid catastrophe. The blackouts affected nearly half a million people . Most people had their power restored on Thursday but PG&E said it would impose more over the weekend as more strong winds were expected.

Climate scientists have warned that Thursday’s heat and strong winds represented just the beginning of several days of fire weather across the state, with the greatest risk still to come. The NBC meteorologist Rob Mayeda called the high pressure event of extra-fast wind and low humidity an “atmospheric hairdryer”.

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High winds reaching 80mph are expected in the North Bay region from Saturday evening through Sunday evening, if not longer. “There will obviously be fire weather concerns again,” warned the NWS. These conditions could mirror those in October 2017, when 21 major fires together burned roughly 245,000 acres (almost 100,000 hectares) and killed 44 people.

Shifting winds could send wildfire smoke streaming down over the Bay Area on Friday, possibly causing delays to flights at San Francisco international airport (SFO), the NWS tweeted.

At the Healdsburg community center near Geyserville, which became a makeshift American Red Cross shelter on Thursday, evacuees milled around the outdoor spaces, checking their phones and waiting for news.

“I’m sleepwalking,” said Tina Tavares, 70. Tavares and her husband, Victor, woke to pitch-black chaos at 5.30am.

“You wake up and they’ve turned off the electricity and all of a sudden you don’t know where you’re going,” Tavares said. “You go into a wall and you’re feeling around because you can’t feel anything and you have somebody banging on your door saying, ‘Get out, get out!’

“The smoke was so thick you couldn’t see my hand,” she said. “All you could see was red, red, red, red. I just covered my mouth and got right into the car.”

Fire officials said multiple structures had been destroyed but could not yet confirm how many.

The evacuated town of Geyserville sits about 23 miles (37km) north of Santa Rosa, where the Tubbs fire left 22 people dead in October 2017, and Thursday’s fire brought back memories of the devastation.

In southern California, Alejandro Corrales watched her home burn on a ridge in Canyon Country, taking with it her mother’s ashes, other belongings and possibly a pen full of pet sheep.

“You start thinking about all the things you can’t get back,” she told KCBS-TV.

Her daughter managed to take some small pets.

“Everything in the house is gone,” Corrales said. “The panels on one of the pens where we have some rescued sheep was too hot for my daughter to open and so she couldn’t let them out … so I’m probably sure that we lost them, too.”

Her three children were safe.

By nightfall, crews reported they had slowed the forward progress of the flames but the winds, accompanied by hot weather and bone-dry humidity, were expected to pick up overnight and possibly increase into Friday, with gusts of 45 to 60mph in places, before easing off.

PG&E confirmed on Thursday that a second round of outages would occur in northern California over the weekend.

Southern California Edison, which cut power to more than 31,000 customers on Thursday, was considering additional power cuts to more than 386,000 customers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Flames approach a vineyard in northern California. Thousands of people will lose their electricity amid dangerous weather. Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

“This could be the strongest wind event of the season, unfortunately,” said Scott Strenfel, a PG&E meteorologist.

Strenfel called the current wind event a “California-wide phenomenon”.

The utilities have said the precautionary blackouts are designed to keep winds from knocking branches into power lines or toppling them, sparking wildfires.

The latest outage comes two weeks after PG&E shut down the power for several days to about 2 million people in northern and central California.

The Sonoma county supervisor James Gore said PG&E had been better this time about getting information to people who would be affected, but he was still astonished by the need to resort to large-scale blackouts.

“I am a big believer in shutdowns to prevent fires. But the thing that erodes public trust is when it doesn’t make sense,” he said. “You say: ‘God, I know if we can put a man on the moon, we can manage a [power] grid.’”

Back at the shelter in Napa county, Tavares and her husband and their two chihuahua mixes, Jake and Savannah, were planning to stay overnight. Though she only slept for two hours, she couldn’t rest with all her fears and worries.

“I’m not too sure what’s going to happen,” Tavares said. “We rent our house. We set it up, we painted the whole inside, we got comfortable. And we might lose everything we put together.”