Wildfires in Wine Country

It's been a long week in wine country in Northern California due to all the wildfires burning in various counties.
Wildfires are a fact of life here, it hardly ever rains between April and October. In previous years, there were plenty of  fires in the general vicinity, but not anywhere near us and never as many of this time. And we almost made it this year, too. Almost, but not quite.
Sunday was very, very windy. We had driven to Sacramento to visit the flea market and vendors there had to secure their treasures to keep them from blowing away. Everybody joked about it.
On the drive home, through Jameson Canyon, we saw smoke ahead of us. We figured the location was the local airport and hoped it wasn't a plane crash. A brush fire, we learned later, quickly brought under control.

The wind was still blowing hard when I went to bed. I woke up around 1:30 am with the wind still howling and happened to look out the window to find this:

Crummy picture, I know, hard to take pictures in the middle of the night with the phone zoomed as much as possible. I woke up DH who told me he had been up past midnight listening to reports of fires breaking out in several locations. I went on Facebook to post the above picture and we lost power almost immediately afterward. All that made for a bad night. I think I checked the location of that fire every 5 minutes for close to an hour. Lucky for us, it never came any closer, but it did burn down a winery near us - Signorello winery.
This is what we woke up to on Monday morning:

At least one visible fire in the hills and lots of smoke. The fires moved, but the smoke was a constant for days. Our electricity stayed off for 40 hours and we had no cell phone service and no wi-fi. We managed to call our daughter in Oregon Monday night and reassure her that we were safe. DH drove to another town on Tuesday to talk to her again and was told she had posted updates on our situation on FB because there were posts from concerned friends.
On one of our drives around town to recharge our electronics - just in case cell service came back - we took shots of a very red sun

other people taking pictures from even better vantage points.

and a positively apocalyptic looking sky:

The red sun, too, was a constant for days:

New fires kept breaking out, this one to the West of Napa.
The following pictures show the smoke from the Atlas fire to the East of Napa:

 

And yet another weird sun picture:

Thursday morning brought a beautiful sunrise and a much clearer day:

The Atlas fire to the East:

And fires to the West, towards Sonoma:

This became a necessity around town:

All the cool people, or, at least, the sensible ones, in town were wearing masks whenever outside. I didn't the first couple of days and developed a nasty cough. I'm okay now, but, if anything like this ever happens again, and I sincerely hope it never will, I will wear that mask from Day 1 on.
Saturday, again, dawned clear:

The wind had shifted to off-shore and all the smoke was being blown towards the ocean.
But, while the fires in Napa county were slowly being brought under control, a new one started in Sonoma and was working its way over the hills towards Napa:

This was the view from our driveway:

Ironic that the sky is bright blue against the smoke from the growing fire.
Here is another picture of the same fire later that day:

But, as of today, there is good news, at least as far as Napa is concerned:

Evacuations for the city of Napa are lifted, it never was a hard evacuation, just an advisory for part of the city, but still ......
The town of Calistoga which was evacuated several days ago is no longer under a mandatory evacuation order, residents are allowed to return home. Six people died in the city of Napa (many more in Santa Rosa and other counties), no structures were destroyed inside city limits, in the county, on the other hand, it was much, much worse. Most people living on Atlas Peak lost their homes, as did those living in Soda Springs Canyon. There are still evacuations in the outlying areas in Napa County.
I have heard that there are/were 10,000 fire fighters involved in fighting the about 20 fires in this area, including some from as far away as Australia. The staging area for them was on the fairgrounds with plenty of tents and mobile homes set up to accommodate them. I saw columns of fire trucks heading towards the fairgrounds every time I had to go out.
PG&E has a huge contingent of trucks S of town. They managed to restore power to just about everybody by now.
As I said, it's been a long week around here, even for those of us who were only peripherally affected. Nobody I know was injured and I think nobody I know lost their home. Several people we know were evacuated and the only one who still does not know whether his home is safe or not is our mechanic (DH's car - the only one we had easy access to while the power was out - gave us problems and will have to be replaced soonish).
Here are some facts and figures and much better pictures than mine about the fires.