The biggest two wildfire complexes, the LNU Lightning Complex and the SCU Lightning Complex are now at least half contained after firefighters made headway on containment lines Saturday. And residents of the Sonoma town of Rio Nido, next to Guerneville, were permitted to return home today after over a week of being evacuated.
SCU Lightning Complex Fires
The SCU Lightning Complex reached 50-percent containment as of Sunday morning, and it stands as the largest blaze of the group at 377,471 acres. Spanning five counties, the fire's southern end continues burning east of Morgan Hill and in an area between Livermore and Tracy, while northern portion of the complex in Contra Costa County was fully contained as of last week. KTVU reports that the fire footprint topped 585 square miles, but the damage to residential areas has been minimal, with 53 structures burned.
CZU Lightning Complex Fires
The CZU Complex burning still in Santa Cruz County stands as just under 85,000 acres and is still only 35-percent contained — up from 26-percent containment as of Friday. Damage assessments on the blazes have continued, bringing the number of homes and structures destroyed in this complex to nearly as many as were burned in the much larger LNU Complex, 1,177 in total. As KSBW reports, evacuation orders continued to being lifted in Santa Cruz County, including parts of Felton and areas of Bear Creek Road.
LNU Lightning Complex Fires
Firefighters continued gaining an upper hand on the Walbridge Fire in Sonoma County, bringing total containment there to 55 percent by Sunday morning. The Walbridge Fire destroyed at least 118 homes out of the total 1,209 structures destroyed in the complex as a whole, many in the Mill Creek area, as the Press Democrat reports. And firefighters were able to make significant progress Saturday on containing the southern end of the fire that was threatening Rio Nido, finally doing on-the-ground work with shovels and hoses in the difficult-to-access are of the fire.
Multiple evacuation orders were downgraded to warnings on Saturday and Sunday, and details about those are all here. The eastern portion of the fire still burning in Napa, Lake, Colusa, and Yolo counties reached 56-percent containment as of Sunday. And for several days fire crews have succeeded in attacking a northern hot spot in the fire that was potentially threatening Middletown, which was significantly damaged in the Valley Fire five years ago.
Woodward Fire
The difficult-to-contain Woodward Fire in West Marin remains, stubbornly, at only 15-percent containment, with just over 3,000 acres now burned. "The marine layer continues to be a double-edged sword," writes the National Park Service incident management team in a Sunday morning update. "While it keeps the intensity of the fire down, it also hinders both the air resources and planned burnout operations... Containment lines continue to be reinforced in these areas in hopes that the conditions will become favorable for burnouts in the near future."
