SANTA ROSA, Calif. (Reuters) - Fast-moving wildfires raging across Northern California’s wine country have killed 17 people, left about 150 missing and destroyed 1,500 homes, wineries and other structures, state fire officials said on Tuesday. 
 
 The flames from 17 major blazes have blackened more than 115,000 acres (46,500 hectares) since fires broke out on Sunday amid hot, dry conditions and high winds. 
 
 The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office said 11 of the fatalities were in its jurisdiction, where 155 people were still missing, although 45 others had been found and some of those unaccounted for may be due to confusion surrounding evacuations. 
 
 In Napa County, the dead included 100-year-old Charles Rippey and his wife, Sarah,, 98, according to the county sheriff’s office. No other details on that incident or the other fatalities were immediately available. 
 
 Crews took advantage of cooler temperatures, lower winds and coastal fog on Tuesday to make headway against the fires but cautioned that homes, wineries and other structures remained at risk. 
 
 “We need to jump on it and take advantage of this lull before any other wind jumps up,” said Steve Crawford, a CAL FIRE operations chief, at an afternoon briefing. “There’s a lot of devastation out there, people running around who just lost everything.” 
 
 North of San Francisco, the fires reduced houses to ashes in several communities. The city of Santa Rosa was particularly hard hit by the so-called Tubbs Fire, which damaged a Hilton hotel and destroyed a mobile home park. 
 
 A hill is being silhouetted by flames during the Nuns Fire in Kenwood, California, U.S., October 10, 2017. REUTERS/Stephen Lam 
 
 Tens of thousands of residents were forced to flee, as schools closed and at least two hospitals in Sonoma County were temporarily shuttered. 
 
 Napa Valley Vintners, a trade group with 550 members, said it was too early to estimate the economic impact of the fires. At least four wineries had suffered “total or very significant losses,” and at least nine reported damage to their winery, outbuildings or surrounding vineyards, the group said. 
 
 Ninety percent of grapes had been picked before the fires started, with almost all of those still on the vine Cabernet Sauvignon, a thick-skinned variety that is not expected to be impacted by smoke from the fires. 
 
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 In addition to potential damage to vineyards from fire itself, sustained exposure to heavy smoke can taint unpicked grapes, according to wine-making experts. 
 
 More than 91,000 homes and businesses served by Pacific Gas & Electric were without power, with most of those customers in Northern California’s Sonoma and Napa counties, and gas was shut off to 28,000 customers, representatives for the utility company said. 
 
 California Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in Napa, Sonoma and five other counties. 
 
 In Southern California, the so-called Canyon Fire 2 has spread to 7,500 acres (3,035 hectares) in Orange County, destroying 14 structures and damaging 22, fire spokesman Thanh Nguyen said. 
 
 The blaze triggered the evacuation of 5,000 people in the communities of Anaheim Hills and Orange Hills as it spread through grass and oak trees, he said, and was only 25 percent contained as of Tuesday afternoon. ||||| Vineyards are lined up as a wildfire burns on a mountaintop Monday, Oct. 9, 2017, in Napa, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) (Associated Press) 
 
 Vineyards are lined up as a wildfire burns on a mountaintop Monday, Oct. 9, 2017, in Napa, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) (Associated Press) 
 
 NAPA, Calif. (AP) — Workers in Northern California's renowned wine country picked through charred debris and plotted what to do with pricey grapes after wildfires swept through lush vineyards, destroying at least two wineries and damaging many others. 
 
 The wind-driven wildfires came as Napa and Sonoma counties were finishing highly anticipated harvests of wine grapes. Monday normally would have found workers picking and processing the ripe grapes to make chardonnay and other wines. 
 
 Instead, melted and blackened wine bottles decorated the ruined Signorello Estate winery in Napa Valley. People at Paradise Ridge Winery in Sonoma County posted photos of debris and haze, saying they were "heartbroken to share the news" that the winery had burned. 
 
 A maintenance worker watched and hoped for the best Monday as flames crept down a hillside by the Gundlach Bundschu Winery. 
 
 "It's right behind the main office. It's working its way down the hillside. What can I say? It's slowly working its way in," Tom Willis said. 
 
 The Napa Valley Vintners, a trade association, said Monday that most wineries were closed because of power outages, evacuation orders and employees who couldn't get to work. The organization said it did not have firm numbers on wineries burned or how the smoke might affect this year's harvest or the industry in general. But it said most grapes had already been picked. 
 
 About 12 percent of grapes grown in California are in Sonoma, Napa and surrounding counties, said Anita Oberholster, a cooperative extension specialist in enology at the University of California, Davis. But they are the highest value grapes, leading to the highest value wines, she said. 
 
 It's hard to predict correctly, but she said chances are good this year's crop won't carry much smoke damage. 
 
 "Even if wines now were heavily affected by smoke, it doesn't carry over to the next season, only in the fruit itself," she said. 
 
 Gloria Ferrer, Ravenswood and Kenwood were among well-known wineries closed for the day because of the fires, according to social media posts. Chateau Montelena Winery, which helped put California on the global wine map when it won a French wine-tasting competition in 1976, escaped damage. 
 
 Wineries that escaped damage grappled with the lack of power, which they need to process the grapes. 
 
 "Some of our growers did pick for us last night. So we had to unload the fruit into our cold barrel room and wait until tomorrow to process it," said Alisa Jacobson, vice president of winemaking at Joel Gott Wines. 
 
 "I think we'll be OK, but it's not an ideal situation. But more importantly, all our employees seem to be doing OK," she said. 
 
 She said she was stunned by the speed of the fires, falling asleep around 10 p.m. Sunday only to wake during the night to the smell of smoke. By 3 a.m. people were being evacuated. 
 
 Lise Asimont, director of grower relations for the Family Coppola wineries, was among the people being urged to leave her Santa Rosa home. She said explosions that made her think of war woke her around 2 a.m. She opened the front door to a sky snowing ash. 
 
 Authorities told her family to prepare to flee, but Asimont was also worried about her grapes, four truckloads of cabernet sauvignon machine-picked in Lodi on Sunday with no way of getting to Coppola facilities Monday because of a closed highway. 
 
 She called a wine maker with LangeTwins winery and vineyards, who had a tank available to crush the grapes and was happy to be able to help. In turn, she passed on the favor to another winery. 
 
 "There's a lot of people helping each other, which is amazing," she said. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Har reported from San Francisco. ||||| Wildfires leave 150 missing and destroy 2,000 structures and large swaths of land, as powerful winds fuel ‘an inferno like you’ve never seen before’ 
 
 At least 15 people have died in northern California after what officials are describing as an “unprecedented” wildfire that has already destroyed 2,000 structures and devastated large swaths of wine country. 
 
 “We often have multiple fires going on, but the majority of them all started right around the same time period, same time of night – it’s unprecedented,” Amy Head, the fire captain spokeswoman for Cal Fire, the state agency responsible for fire protection, told the Guardian. “I hate using that word because it’s been overused a lot lately because of how fires have been in the past few years, but it truly is – there’s just been a lot of destruction.” 
 
 As of Tuesday afternoon, the Sonoma sheriff’s office said about 150 people were still reported as missing. 
 
 About 20,000 people have been evacuated, including hundreds of senior citizens from nursing homes, and public schools in Napa and Sonoma counties were closed on Tuesday. Major fires in those regions remain completely uncontained, threatening thousands of homes and vineyards in the wine country north of San Francisco. 
 
 Still, calmer conditions on Monday night helped fire crews get a handle on the situation, said another Cal Fire spokeswoman, Heather Williams. 
 
 “The acreage isn’t going up drastically, and hopefully over the next few days we’re going to start to see those containment numbers go up.” 
 
 California’s governor, Jerry Brown, has declared a state of emergency in eight mostly northern counties – Butte, Lake, Mendocino, Napa, Nevada, Orange, Sonoma and Yuba counties. On Monday, during a visit to the state, Vice-President Mike Pence said he had spoken with Brown. 
 
 “The dryness of the climate, the strength of the winds – you all in California know much better than this midwesterner does,” Pence said. “But I can assure you, as I did the governor, that the federal government stands ready to provide any and all assistance to the state of California.” 
 
 Eleven of the deaths occurred in Napa and Sonoma counties, according to Cal Fire. Three were further north, in Mendocino county, and the last in the eastern Yuba county, officials said. 
 
 Entire neighborhoods and a trailer park in the town of Santa Rosa, 55 miles from San Francisco, have already been razed, along with a Hilton hotel, according to local reports. 
 
 Years of drought in California, followed by an extremely wet winter, have meant that vegetation is thicker and more susceptible to the fires that tend to be at their worst in the autumn. Officials say the high winds are hampering firefighting efforts in the region about 140 miles (225km) north of San Francisco. To assist with the efforts the country’s largest firefighting aircraft – a converted 747 – has been deployed. 
 
 “It was an inferno like you’ve never seen before,” said Marian Williams, who caravanned with neighbors through flames before dawn as one of the wildfires reached the vineyards and ridges at her small Sonoma County town of Kenwood. 
 
 Williams could feel the heat of her fire through the car as she fled. “Trees were on fire like torches,” she said. 
 
 Mandatory evacuations were ordered in counties north of San Francisco Bay and elsewhere after blazes broke out late on Sunday. 
 
 Play Video 0:37 View from the sky reveals California wildfires devastation - video 
 
 Williams, said that 17 major fires had started in the past 36 hours in the California, burning about 115,000 acres, mostly in the northern part of the state. 
 
 She added that unusually high winds had made the fires spread so quickly. “Night-time is when humidity is the highest and temperatures are cooler, but that wind, fueled by denser vegetation, really pushed these fires so quickly.” 
 
 The high number of deaths in one series of connected fires is unusual. There have been, on average, 13 wildfire deaths a year in the whole of the US since 2014, according to figures collated by the National Interagency Fire Center. 
 
 Head, the Cal Fire captain, said the fires were probably linked to a warming climate. “It has been hotter, it has been drier, our fire seasons have been longer, fires are burning more intensely, which is a direct correlation to the climate changing,” she said. 
 
 With so many fires, residents of Sonoma County struggled to figure out which roads to take, finding downed trees or flames blocking some routes. 
 
 
 
 Fires also burned just to the east in the Napa County wine country as well as in Yuba, Butte and Nevada counties, all north of the state capital. Cal Fire tweeted that as many as 8,000 homes were threatened in Nevada County, which lies on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. 
 
 Smoke was thick in San Francisco, 60 miles (96km) south of the Sonoma County fire. 
 
 Play Video 0:17 Family film their escape from California wildfire: 'even the road is alight' – video 
 
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 Pillars of heavy smoke rose from the hills surrounding the town of Napa as the sun set on one of the deadliest days of wildfires in California’s history. As darkness took over, the hills around wine country glowed red. 
 
 “We’ve never had a fire like this before,” said Mike Willmarth, a Napa middle school teacher who has lived in the area for 30 years. “We’ve never had devastation like this.” 
 
 
 
 Margaret Beardsley, 92, sat in a wheelchair next to her husband, Robert, and daughter, Nora. Beardsley used an oxygen tank and wore a surgical mask – the smoke in the air had irritated her lungs. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Burned out wine bottles sit on a rack at the fire damaged Signorello Estate winery. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images 
 
 “It’s terrible,” said Beardsley, who has lived in Napa for 46 years and never been evacuated before. “When we left we had no idea if we would have anything to come back to. I want to go home and sleep in my own bed.” 
 
 The lack of information was frustrating George Bradley, 74, a retired cement mason who has lived in the Napa area for his entire life. He hadn’t been able to contact his mother, and was worried about the house he had evacuated at about 1.30pm. 
 
 
 
 “We just paid it off. We just got the deed,” he said. “We don’t know if it’s still standing or not.” 
 
 
 
 The fire’s economic impact is not yet known – the hundreds of wineries in Napa and Sonoma valleys are their lifeblood. Reports indicate that two wineries – Signorello Estate Winery and Paradise Ridge Winery – were destroyed and that portions of another, Stags’ Leap, were also burned. 
 
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 Although most of this year’s grapes have been harvested, the remaining 20% are some of the most valuable, said Jennifer Putnam, executive director of Napa Valley Grapegrowers, the Napa Valley vineyard trade association. “It’s some of the best fruit that Napa produces, all of the cabernet sauvignon, so it will have a major economic impact if this last 20% can’t be picked,” she said. “We will have to see where we are tomorrow and next week to see how the grapes are metabolizing all this smoke.” 
 
 Agencies contributed reporting 
 

– "We are a resilient county; we will come back from this," Sonoma County Supervisor Shirlee Zane said Monday after devastating wildfires swept through the region. "But right now we need to grieve." Seven people died in her county, making the total at least 10 across northern California, the Los Angeles Times reports. Officials say that in one of the most destructive fire outbreaks in state history, at least 15 fires have scorched more than 90,000 acres in eight counties. More than 20,000 people have fled their homes. At least 100 have been injured and 1,500 structures destroyed. The latest: Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in Butte, Lake, Mendocino, Napa, Nevada, Orange, Sonoma, and Yuba counties and asked President Trump to declare a major disaster, the New York Times reports. "The heat, the lack of humidity, and the winds are all driving a very dangerous situation and making it worse," he said. As firefighters continued to battle the blazes overnight, a spokesman for Brown's Office of Emergency Services said favorable weather conditions were helping, though the death toll could still rise. "Firefighters and emergency management workers were taking advantage of the winds dying down ...and a lot of work is going to be done overnight and early (Tuesday) morning," Brad Alexander said, per Reuters. The region's famous wineries were hit hard: The Signorello Estate winery in Napa Valley and the Paradise Ridge Winery in Sonoma County were destroyed and many other suffered damage just when workers were almost finished harvesting this year's grapes, the AP reports. Wineries that escaped damage still had to deal with the loss of power. Cal Fire captain Amy Head says it is unprecedented for so many fires to start around the same time of night, the Guardian reports. She believes climate change is responsible. "It has been hotter, it has been drier, our fire seasons have been longer, fires are burning more intensely, which is a direct correlation to the climate changing," she says. Celebrity athletes including Barry Bonds were at Ronnie Lott's celebrity fundraiser at Mayacama Golf Club in Santa Rosa when the rapidly approaching fire led to a scramble to evacuate, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. "I was out on the balcony at Mayacama when the power went out and sat down, and saw the moon come up. It was very nice," former Kansas City pitcher Bret Saberhagen says. "And then I saw the moon turn orange and it started getting lighter and lighter. I saw the fire coming over the ridge and I could hear propane and gas tanks popping."