“Though the weather event will end Monday, power restoration could take several days,” the sheriff’s office said.

For those with homes in the fire’s path, anxiety and hope.

In the far northeast corner of Santa Rosa, James Barbee and his neighbors were circling streets blocked off by sheriffs’ deputies, fire departments and National Guard troops, looking for some way to get through and check on their homes in Windsor to the north.

Mr. Barbee, 71, said he was a Vietnam War veteran who recently had hip surgery, so he evacuated promptly when warnings were posted on Saturday. “I just don’t want to have to outrun fire,” he said.

Before long, though, he grew frustrated by a lack of information about when he might know the fate of his home, and was already running through scenarios in his mind about what insurance might cover or how expensive it might be to rebuild, in an area where property values have skyrocketed in recent decades.

“You have too many people, too little space,” Mr. Barbee said. “When you’re disabled, when you’re elderly, and when you’re a combat vet with chronic PTSD, it’s like three strikes.”

Outside the closed Mark West Market, where no one had thought to turn off the “open” sign, a man who would give his name only as Jerry stopped for what he feared might be his last look at the neighborhood as he knows it. His family evacuated Saturday night, he said, but Jerry, a retired sales manager, stayed behind on East Shiloh Road in the house where they have lived for two decades for a single reason.

“Hope,” he said. “Hope that it would pass us by. It did before.”

A temporary evacuation shelter set up at the Marin Center, an exposition hall, had filled its 600 cots by around 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, said Jada Ragle and Marvel Hazeldene, roommates who had evacuated from Santa Rosa. Evacuees who arrived after the cutoff were being directed to shelters in Sacramento and Napa, while others opted to camp in their cars.