‘A hell-storm of smoke and ash’: California wine-country wildfires force thousands to flee

SANTA ROSA, Calif. - It wasn't the smoke or heat, but the sound of a honking car horn that jolted Seth Knox's family awake at 1:30 a.m. Monday.

One of their neighbors - entrusted with a gate code - had made her way up the long driveway of the Knox's home in Sonoma. She had been going door to door, warning friends of a wildfire headed their way.

Knox stepped outside and peered into the darkness. An orange glow appeared over the ridge, lighting up a silhouette of the mountains. Around them, a gusting wind howled through the tall pine trees on his property, blowing smoke their way.

Knox was shocked.

None of that had been even remotely apparent when he had gone to bed around 10 p.m. the night before.

'You could feel it in your eyes and it was in your throat,” Knox told the Washington Post. 'There were kind of flames whipping over the ridge.”

Instantly, they decided to leave home. Knox, his wife and two daughters threw a few days' worth of clothes into carry-on bags and loaded their belongings - along with their barking dogs, a Labrador puppy and a cocker spaniel - into the family's two cars. Within minutes, they were driving out of the neighborhood, stopping to knock on the doors of friends' houses along the way.

'We didn't take any personal items or documents or anything,” Knox said. 'We just left ... We're lucky we got out when we did.”

Knox would soon learn similar scenes had played out across California's wine country, where at least 17 separate fires have ravaged northern California since Sunday, fueled by 'red flag” fire conditions and 50- to 60-mph winds.

The fast-spreading fires have burned more than 107,000 acres - a collective area roughly the size of New Orleans - and killed at least 11 people, with about 150 more reported missing.

Sonoma County officials warned Tuesday that the death toll was likely to go up.

Even by the standards of a severe wildfire season in the West, the rapid spread of the northern California fires was shocking - 'a phenomenal rate of growth,” Cal Fire spokesman Jonathan Cox said. Officials began ordering mandatory evacuations around 11 p.m. Sunday, forcing thousands of residents to flee their homes and schools to close across the region.

The smoke from the wine-country fires was so severe that many in San Francisco, more than 40 miles to the south, reported being able to smell it.

'This is really serious. It's moving fast,” California Gov. Jerry Brown, D, said at a news conference Monday. 'The heat, the lack of humidity and the winds are all driving a very dangerous situation and making it worse. It's not under control by any means. But we're on it in the best way we know how.”

In Napa and Sonoma counties alone, hundreds of homes had been 'catastrophically destroyed,” Brown wrote Monday in a lengthy letter to the White House seeking federal assistance as he declared a state of emergency in seven counties.

Santa Rosa, the largest city in Sonoma County, bore severe early fire damage after a blaze dubbed the 'Tubbs Fire” moved southwest from Calistoga in Napa Valley, jumped Highway 101 and entered the city late Sunday.

The flames forced at least two hospitals in Santa Rosa to evacuate its patients. Drone footage from Sunday showed whole neighborhoods engulfed in fire.

Ken Moholt-Siebert told the Los Angeles Times that he and his wife barely escaped the fast-moving flames that had threatened their family's Santa Rosa winery Sunday night.

'There was no wind, then there would be a rush of wind and it would stop. Then there would be another gust from a different direction,” Moholt-Siebert, 51, told the newspaper. 'The flames wrapped around us ... I was just being pelted with all this smoke and embers.”

He added that the fire had probably destroyed their vineyard of pinot noir grapes, along with family heirlooms and a 200-year-old oak tree.

One Santa Rosa resident compared the evacuation scenes to something 'like Armageddon.”

'People are running red lights,” Ron Dodds told KTVU. 'There is chaos ensuing.”

In Rincon Valley, on the northeast outskirts of Santa Rosa, pastor Andy VomSteeg opened his New Vintage Church to those fleeing the fire.

By Monday afternoon, more than 400 people, many of them elderly, had taken refuge inside.

'I left without my clothes,” said Nell Magnuson, a resident of the luxury retirement home Villa Capri. She wore only a maroon robe.

'We had to get out in a hurry,” she said. 'When we left, the flames were in the second floor.”

Magnuson, who was worried about where she would sleep Monday night, said that 'our whole lives have turned upside down. We don't have a clue what's going to happen. It's just losing everything. All the pictures, my whole life.”

But before her concerns could be addressed, the fire began to threaten the church.

'You caught us just in time,” Magnuson said as she headed for the exit. 'We're being evacuated again.”

By early Monday, aerial pictures of Santa Rosa showed street after street of homes burned to the ground, smoke still twisting between the charred remains of pine trees.