Fire impacting homes, power lines may have cut power to thousands in south Sacramento
A fire impacted multiple residences in South Oak Park late Monday morning and may have been linked to a brief but widespread power outage in the south Sacramento area.
The incident ignited in the backyard of a vacant building near 26th Avenue and 34th Street, and it “impacted several other properties” along 27th Avenue before firefighters gained control of it, the Sacramento Fire Department said in a social media post shortly after 11:30 a.m.
Fire Department spokesman Capt. Keith Wade said the fire started shortly after 11 a.m. and quickly began impacting “structures, outbuildings and power lines.”
Sacramento Municipal Utility District reported a large outage impacting more than 20,000 customers in the south Sacramento area beginning a short time after the fire started, according to an outage map on its website. SMUD said in a social media post shortly after 11:50 a.m. that it was working to restore power to those customers, and said the cause of the outage had not been officially determined.
Nine minutes later, SMUD tweeted that power was fully restored in the area.
Wade said investigators are working to determine the cause of the fire. He said officials received reports that homeless individuals may have been living in the vacant backyard.
Smoke from the fire, burning just east of Highway 99, could briefly be seen from the freeway in the area but had mostly subsided by around noon, Caltrans live traffic cameras showed.
The fire ignited amid very windy conditions, as Sacramento and the vast majority of Northern California remain under a red flag warning from the National Weather Service, which has warned of extremely critical fire weather through at least 5 p.m. Tuesday.
This story was originally published October 26, 2020 at 12:30 PM.
