There are now 1,931 cases of Covid-19 in Santa Cruz County. The Bay Area has 91,246 cases while the state reports a total of 741,593 cases. Law enforcement put extra personnel to work over the Labor Day weekend in an effort to keep people off area beaches and put a lid on the spread of coronavirus. The Main Beach at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk Monday was eerily blank, save for a few people that crossed the sand to hop into the sea, which was legal.
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A transformer blew up around 8 am today near Kilburn and Rodriguez streets in Watsonville. With talk of power outages, high temperatures, drift smoke and more, the incident falls on already fragile nerves. Watsonville Fire got on the issue quickly. They learned from a neighbor that a bird came in contact with lines and a small explosion knocked out power to residents in the area.
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The CZU August Lightning Complex Fire is now around 80 percent contained in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Burning since Aug.16 following a rare lightning storm, the blaze has now burned more than 135 square miles. Five counties in California are in a state of emergency. Record-shattering temps have added tremendously to the fire battle.
These are all heat records from Monday:
- KIng City, 109
- Gilroy, 114
- Hollister, 113
- Big Sur, 113
PG&E is planning a wave of public safety power shutoffs around the SF Bay Area due to the red alert conditions regarding high heat.
Meteorologists now say temps will start to back off. The marine layer drifted in late Monday and played a big part in quelling heat. And the smoke layer is thinning out, this morning anyway. It’s interesting and educational to note that there is an air quality chart online that gives hourly reading about our air and the smoke. Today at 8:30am it read a number of 34, which translates to the green zone on their “safe to dangerous” chart. To give you a scale, Monday got up to 106 at one point.
The Dolan Fire in the Big Sur area is now 40% contained and has blackened 36,237 acres.
