Thousands Told To Evacuate As Fire Blazes In Northern California Wine Country

About 2,000 people were told to evacuate the area where a large fire is burning in Northern California’s Sonoma County on Thursday, as the state remained under high alert for dangerous fire weather.

The Kincade Fire, which started late Wednesday and spread rapidly overnight, had reached more than 10,000 acres and was 0% contained by Thursday afternoon, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

Mandatory evacuations were ordered for the entire town of Geyserville, a community of about 900 residents in the region’s wine country.

At an afternoon news conference on Thursday, Cal Fire officials confirmed that some structures had burned but they did not know how many. No injuries had been reported yet.

The fire was blazing just a 30-minute drive north of Santa Rosa, where two years ago this month, a wildfire burned thousands of homes and killed 44 people ― the deadliest wildfire in California at the time. Last November, the Camp Fire hit Paradise, about a three-hour drive north from the current conflagration, and killed 85 people ― making it the deadliest wildfire in state history.