[10:30AM UPDATE: The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office has issued updated evacuation orders and warnings in areas north of Windsor threatened by the Walbridge Wildfire. Check the Sheriff’s Nixle Alert for more information.

Cal Fire’s Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit is streaming a briefing at 11am. We will update this article with more information based on the briefing.]

The North Bay fire complex enveloping hundreds of thousands of acres in three counties continued to grow on Friday night and is still largely uncontained, according to a 7:00am report by Cal Fire’s Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit.

The LNU Lightning Complex, which was caused by lightning on the morning of Monday, Aug. 17, has enveloped a total of 314,2017 acres and threatens an estimated 30,500 structures in Napa, Sonoma and Lake counties, according to the Cal Fire report.

The fire complex has killed four civilians, destroyed 560 structures and damaged 125 structures so far.

The Hennessey Fire, which represents multiple merged fires in Napa and Lake counties, currently encompasses 261,793 acres. The fire is 15 percent contained.

The Walbridge and Meyers fires in Sonoma County are smaller but less contained. The Walbridge Fire, located west of Healdsburg, covers 50,069 acres and is 0 percent contained, according to CalFire’s morning report. The Meyers Fire, located north of Jenner, is 2,345 acres in size and 0 percent contained.

In a separate morning briefing, Sonoma County’s Emergency Management Director Chris Godley reported that “The [Walbridge] fire behaved itself last night.”

High humidity over night helped to slow the fire’s growth overnight, Godley wrote. Although it did grow slightly on almost all sides, according to a map from the Sonoma County Water Agency, the fire did not move significantly in any one direction.

Numerous evacuation orders and warnings remain in effect in parts of the North Bay threatened by fire as of Saturday, Aug. 22.

Napa County’s fire map is available here. Sonoma County fire map is available here.

Weather Threats Predicted

The National Weather Service has announced a fire weather watch for much of the state beginning on 5am on Sunday, Aug. 23.

“There is potential for dry lightning,” Godley wrote of the National Weather Service warning. “Heavy gusty winds will exacerbate our fire conditions.”

Air Quality

Air quality levels remain unhealthy throughout much of the Bay Area due to heightened levels of fine particulate matter associated with wildfires.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) has reported unhealthy levels of smoke in the air throughout the week, especially in the East Bay and Santa Clara Valley, causing health officials to warn that exposure to wildfire smoke could weaken residents’ resistance to Covid-19.

Although BAAQMD is reporting relatively safe air quality levels through much of the North Bay, Sonoma County’s Health Officer Dr. Sundari Mase told reporters in a press briefing on Friday afternoon that, after comparing data from several air quality data sources, she had concluded that levels have reached unsafe levels in parts of Sonoma County.

Mase said that air quality levels had reached 156 on the Air Quality Index (AQI) due to smoke from the wildfires.

Levels above 150 on the AQI are considered unhealthy for anyone. Under a state workplace safety rule passed in 2018, employers are required to offer employees working outside N95 masks when the AQI exceeds 150.

State agencies are working on distributing roughly one million N95 masks to farm workers through county Ag Commissioners, Cal OSHA announced in a press release on Thursday, Aug. 20.

2020, the metaphorical dumpster fire that it is, also happens to be a Census year. As a result, the Census Bureau has dispatched thousands of employees around the country to begin the second half of its once-in-a-decade count.

Armed with a phone app and trained to follow local and federal Covid-19 health guidelines, the Census takers are now visiting households which have not filled in Census questionnaires online, by phone or by letter, according to Joshua Green, a Census Bureau spokesperson.

When they visit a home, Census takers are trained to ask questions from a safe distance, ultimately inputting the information into a phone app.

Census data is used to redraw Congressional districts and calculate the amount of funding local government agencies receive from numerous federal and state programs. The data, which is meant to record every single person in the country, is also used by scholars to study and understand societal changes.

If you would not like a Census taker to come to your house, you may respond online, by mail or by phone, Green says.

In addition to being interrupted earlier in the year by the pandemic response, the Census has taken on a new level of controversy this year.

This week Los Angeles and San Jose joined other cities in a lawsuit against the Trump administration in response to its decision to advance the Census data collection deadline from Oct. 31 to Sept. 30. Others have voiced concern that fears among vulnerable communities that their information will be sent on to law enforcement agencies, including ICE, could dampen response rates in some communities.

In an interview on Thursday, Green dismissed both concerns. The Census Bureau is barred under federal law from sharing Census data with law enforcement, Green said.

As for the collection deadline, the Census Bureau’s deadline to submit completed data to President Donald Trump remains Dec. 31, and moving the collection deadline forward will allow the agency more time to prepare the collected data, Green said.

Despite all of the hurdles 2020 has presented, beginning with the pandemic and now continuing with widespread wildfires, it appears that California and three North Bay counties are on track to meet or surpass the 2010 self-reporting rates, according to the Census Bureau’s online self-reporting map.

As of Thursday, Aug. 20, Marin and Sonoma counties had already surpassed their 2010 rates—Marin was at 73.8 percent, 1.7 percent above its 2010 rate; and Sonoma County was at 67.4 percent, an impressive 10.1 percent above the county’s rate last time around. Napa County, meanwhile, was just 0.4 percent shy of its 2010 self-response rate as of Thursday, Aug. 20.

Statewide, the self-response rate is 66.1 percent as of Friday, Aug. 21, compared to 68.2 percent in 2010.

On Friday, the Associated Press reported on a watchdog agency’s report that raises further concerns about the Bureau’s ability to complete an accurate, full count due to a shortage of Census takers. Bureau officials have rejected those concerns as well.

What about the ongoing wildfires and resulting evacuation orders in parts of the state?

“Those who are concerned about their community being undercounted because of the fires should get out the message that no matter where a family or individual happens to be sleeping at any given time, anyone can self-respond to the census,” Green said.

“We want people to respond based on where they were living before the fire displaced them, not where they are temporarily living,” Green said, when asked what people displaced by the fires should do.

More information about the Census is available at 2020census.gov.

Federal, state and local self-response data is available here.