Santa Rosa tied a record high of 103 degrees on Saturday as the National Weather Service issued a red flag warning indicating higher fire danger for Sonoma County and the wider Bay Area that will last through Sunday morning.
The risk of dry lightning because of fast-moving storms prompted the warning, which included Napa County and was scheduled to last from 11 p.m. Saturday through 11 a.m. Sunday.
The area at risk for wildfire stretches all the way from Sonoma to Monterey and San Benito counties, where the warning began at 4 p.m. But the threat posed locally should not be great, said Brayden Murdock, a meteorologist with the weather service.
“It’s not a very high chance,” Murdock said of storms reaching our area. The weather service said the chance of storms was only at 20%.
The red flag warning comes amid a record-setting heat wave in the North Bay. Temperatures topped 100 degrees on Friday and Saturday in Santa Rosa and are expected to remain near triple digits throughout the week as a result of a ridge of high pressure from the south. The record high of 103 for Santa Rosa on Aug. 15 was also reached last year.
The high on Sunday should be in the 90s, but by Monday temperatures could reach 100 degrees, Murdock said. Accuweather forecasts a high of 106 degrees for Tuesday.
Residents will have to wait until around Thursday for the region to get in the lower 90s with more seasonal overnight lows in the upper 50s, he said.
The extreme temperatures caused rolling blackouts across Sonoma County on Friday. More than 40,000 homes and businesses were without power, and residents were warned that they could experience such outages over the weekend, though none occurred locally as of Saturday night.
Demand for electricity neared capacity and peaked slightly after 5 p.m. Saturday, according to the California Independent System Operator. By 6:30 p.m., the independent grid operator declared an emergency and requested utilities begin turning off the power.
In response, PG&E conducted outages affecting about 220,000 PG&E customers in portions of the Central Coast and Central Valley, including Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Joaquin counties.
The last time the state ordered rolling outages because of high electricity demand was during an energy crisis in 2001. Blackouts occurred several times from January to May, including one that affected more than 1.5 million customers. The cause was a combination of energy shortages and market manipulation by energy wholesalers, infamously including Enron Corp.
Measures that conserve energy include setting thermostats to 78 degrees or higher, unplugging unused electronics and avoiding doing laundry or running the dishwasher during daytime hours, according to PG&E.
Staff Writer Elissa Chudwin contributed to this report. This article includes information from the Associated Press.
