Solano County fire officials extend red flag warning, brace for brutal fire season

With wind and warm temperatures, a red flag warning continues for parts of Solano County where conditions on the ground are pointing towards a long, dangerous fire season.

“Yep, Red Flag,” said Fairfield Fire Marshal Steven Conti. “There’s just too much dry vegetation with the drought, and moisture levels. I could go on and on.”

Conti was locking up Rockville Hills Regional Park, just one of those closed today in an effort to limit traffic and risk given the weather.

“These kinds of winds, one spark and it’s going to have this whole hill going on, this whole park,”  Conti said of the conditions.

Even greater risk is growing in the land itself as California drifts deeper into a dry period that’s just beginning to come into focus.

“We just got reports that we have the driest conditions we’ve had in 12 centuries,”  Conti said. “Think about that. Not days, not months. Centuries. The information we receive is just getting worse, year-by-year.”

This is why the round of April showers didn’t deliver much confidence among firefighters, they were already looking at very dry fuels.

“Our concern is the heavier fuels, what we refer to as the thousand-hour fuels,” Santa Rosa Fire Marshal  Paul Lowenthal said at the time. “Heavy timber, brush, those have not received nearly enough moisture. The levels those are currently at are levels they should not be at for this time of year.”

“Again, if it started going, embers jumping, the fire would just continue to go until our crews,”  Conti said of Monday’s danger. “And it would be a challenge. Look at the terrain.”

Conti says the 135-acre Quail Fire in nearby Vacaville was a sign of what’s ahead; a busy year trying to stop the next big fire.

“It’s only a matter of time until one of those starts, and a small fire turns into a catastrophic fire,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to avoid.”

Some counties do still declare official start dates. Sonoma, for example, will do that June 9th.