Here’s an oddity: those fires in California wine country that have taken at least 40 lives, and burned 217,566 acres, and destroyed at least 10 wineries barely touched vineyards.
Most of the damage appears to be in urban locales, not in wineries or vineyards themselves.
Napa’s Signorello Estate saw its tasting room burn to the ground. But 40 acres of decades-old wines survived.
“The vines appear to be almost 100% intact,” Ray Signorello Jr., the proprietor, said. “The fire just came up to the edge of the vineyard and stopped.”
This year’s crop had been harvested, and was unscathed, Signorello told the Los Angeles Times. Barreled wine, stored in a separate steel-sided building, also was undamaged, he said.
Fire officials have said they considered the relatively open space of vineyards, which hold more moisture than oak forests, to be a natural firebreak that allowed their forces to concentrate on protecting populated areas and structures.
One reason: A standing vine has a moisture content of as much as 50% even in dry years. For a vine to reach its fiber saturation point — where it could burn through — requires a prolonged heating period. Wildfires move fast.
“Vineyards save lives,” Jennifer Putnam, executive director of Napa Valley Grapegrowers, who has a college degree in forestry, told The Los Angeles Times. “They saved property and lives in Napa County. It’s as clear as it can be.”
Not only did vineyards serve as firebreaks, but the fact is, viticulturist Daniel Roberts of Sonoma County’s Integrated Wine Growing told the San Francisco Chronicle, fire can burn them back, and they won’t have crop next year. But I’ve brought vineyards back after fire.”
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times uncovered the fact that Coffey Park, the part of Santa Rosa that suffered the greatest damage, was exempt from regulations designed to make buildings fire resistant in high-risk areas.
That’s because the state assumed that urban areas were unburnable. But fire experts now believe the fire that destroyed Coffey Park was ignited by embers blown from a distance. Firebrands capable of igniting a house can travel more than a mile.
Since parkway trees and some trash cans were untouched, fire experts believe most of the damage was from fire spreading from house to house. “Those houses are like highly concentrated energy packages just waiting to ignite,” said Donald Falk, a wildland fire researcher in the University of Arizona School of Natural Resources and the Environment. “In that wind-driven situation, I think the predictions of what’s fire-safe and what’s not kind of go out the window.”
The most common way for a firebrand to set a house on fire is by entering the attic through an attic vent. There wasn’t a requirement those in Coffey Park be screened. This might explain why vineyards were intact in some cases while the house on the property burned to the ground.