High winds fuel new fires in California

The Kincade Fire — (Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Wildfires erupted in Northern California wine country and in other parts of the state on Thursday, the Los Angeles Times reported. The Kincade fire, fueled by wind gusts exceeding 70 miles per hour, quickly burned more than 16,000 acres in northern Sonoma County, racing through oaks and vineyards.

Firefighters scrambled to contain the blaze as hot, windy, dry conditions threatened to fuel it this weekend. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has cut power to hundreds of thousands of Californians to prevent electrical lines hit by high winds from starting more fires,. It was not immediately clear whether electrical lines contributed to the Sonoma County fire, although PG&E told state regulators that transmission-tower equipment broke near the point where the fire started, near Geyserville in northeastern Sonoma County, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.