Many people have lost their homes and belongings in the wildfires.
For cattle ranchers around Fairfield, it's the loss of acres of grassland that is crippling. The LNU Lightning Complex, a combination of fires that covers more than 130,000 acres across Napa, Sonoma, Lake, Yolo and Solano counties, ripped through parts of Fairfield late Wednesday, forcing sudden evacuations, destroying homes and blackening open fields.
Along a street flanked by charred hills and abandoned homes, Tim and Roxane Wellman fix part of their barbed wire fence.
"(The fire) came through here and they stopped it and they kept it off the houses over there and then late in the afternoon the thing went down and changed and came back from the south and that’s when it really got bad," he said.
Some horses stuck around, but the cattle took off - apparently in search of grass.
"This is our livelihood and so to lose this many acres of feed it’s like dollars signs burning up," Roxane added. "People might think that’s just grass, but that’s worth a fortune to us."
For Roxane’s friends in this close-knit community, some of what burned is irreplaceable.
"People lost everything. They lost family photographs from eight generations back. They’ve lost dream homes they’ve just built. It’s just tragic," Roxane said.
Some of the homes now gone were over 100 years old.
"The pandemic, the hundred-plus degree temperatures, and now this? I just want to kiss this year goodbye."
