LOS ANGELES — As two wildfires raged across Southern California on Tuesday, nearly doubling in size overnight and forcing thousands more people to flee their homes, the state’s utility companies are again coming under scrutiny for their potential role in sparking new blazes.
Southern California Edison said its equipment may have played a role in starting one of the fires, the Silverado Fire, which had churned through 12,600 acres in Orange County.
The fire raised more concerns about whether utilities have substantially improved their safety efforts, and whether the company should have more broadly shut off power in Southern California this week. Edison’s posture stood in contrast to Pacific Gas and Electric, which turned off power to a broad swath of Northern California beginning on Sunday over fears of dangerous wildfire conditions.
Fueled by strong Santa Ana winds, the fires in Orange County have put more than 90,000 people under emergency evacuation orders, many of them in Irvine. Their homes are being threatened by both the Silverado Fire and the Blue Ridge Fire, which has a footprint of about 15,000 acres.
Investigators have not determined what ignited the fires, but on Monday, Southern California Edison filed its second wildfire incident report this year, saying that a telecommunications line might have struck its equipment and might have caused the Silverado Fire. Last month, the utility filed a report that said its equipment was part of an investigation into the cause of the Bobcat Fire, which burned about 116,000 acres near Pasadena.
Edison said on Tuesday that it did not cut power to the line possibly connected with the Silverado Fire because wind speeds were not high enough to warrant it.
Even critics of the utilities cautioned against drawing conclusions about the incident reports. Telecommunications companies hang their wires on utility poles and are responsible for their own equipment.
“We don’t want to make any wide-eyed accusations without having the evidence,” said Mark Toney, executive director of the Utility Reform Network, which represents consumers before the utility commission.
The record-breaking 2020 fire season has seen enormous wildfires tear across California and other states in the West. Experts have linked the worsening fire season to climate change, as emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases from the burning of fossil fuels have led to warmer and drier conditions.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that while fall fires are predictable, “Just about everything else about the present situation is quite unusual.”
More than five million acres have burned across California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington State this year. In California alone, fires have burned more than 4.1 million acres, destroyed 10,488 homes and other structures and led to at least 31 deaths.
There were concerns on Tuesday about whether the wildfires could affect voting in Orange County, where thousands of people are under evacuation orders. Numerous places around Irvine and other parts of the county, such as parks and schools and community centers, had been set up as evacuation centers. At least four of those sites, officials said, are also slated to be voting centers, raising the possibility that they may not be able to open for voters later in the week if the fires do not subside.
“Right now we’re at a wait and see,” said Neal Kelley, Orange County’s registrar of voters. “We’ll start making decisions tomorrow.”
Mr. Kelley said he had been in consultation with fire officials on Tuesday, and had been told they were hopeful that the winds would subside, and that evacuees would be able to go home in time for voting. He said the county’s plan had been to set up the voting sites on Thursday, to be ready to open on Friday.
More than 750 firefighters have been battling the blazes, which were known to have damaged 10 homes as of late Tuesday afternoon. But the area of concern widened as winds blew the fires to new areas, including toward Chino Hills, a city of about 84,000 people that sits at the corner of Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside Counties.
The Orange County Fire Authority, which is the lead agency battling both fires, said it hoped that softening winds would slow the fires’ pace and allow firefighters to use aircraft to contain the blazes. The Silverado Fire is 5 percent contained and the Blue Ridge Fire is completely uncontained.
Firefighters on Tuesday said they were hopeful that, with forecasts predicting that winds would subside in the afternoon and evening, they would be able to increase the containment of the fires and, possibly, allow people to start returning to their homes.
“Our concern is getting people back in their homes once it’s safe,” said Capt. Jason Fairchild, of the Orange County Fire Authority.
While officials set up numerous evacuation centers, many residents who evacuated chose to avoid them, either out of concerns about the coronavirus or because they could afford to stay in hotels.
Mina Darabi, 57, who lives in Irvine, rushed out of her home on Monday, grabbing passports and whatever family photographs could be found. While her husband and 14-year-old son stayed at a hotel, she chose to stay in her car in the parking lot of a high school, which was set up as an evacuation center.
“Because of the coronavirus I didn’t want to go to the hotel,” she said. “I don’t know, I was so overwhelmed and I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”
She said that she spent a cold, sleepless night in her car, and that Tuesday night she would likely join her family at a hotel. “It was so windy and cold that I didn’t get out of the car to go to the bathroom,” she said.
Two firefighters were gravely wounded by the Silverado Fire, and they were intubated on Monday after receiving second- and third-degree burns across most of their bodies, said Brian Fennessy, the fire authority’s chief.
The injuries to the firefighters, who are 26 and 31 years old, only raise the stakes in the scrutiny over the actions of the utility companies.
Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, which pioneered the strategy of power outages to reduce wildfire risk, typically cut power to fewer homes and businesses at a time than Pacific Gas and Electric, which has been more willing to cut off power to tens of thousands of customers.
“I think most customers are much happier with the surgical approach with the wildfire shut-offs,” Mr. Toney said. “I don’t see any evidence in effectiveness” in PG&E’s approach, he said.
Tuesday morning, fewer than 20,000 Edison customers were without power compared with about 100,000 in PG&E’s service area — including the Bay Area, where thousands of households and businesses have bought backup power systems since the widespread outages were first carried out last year. The backup power systems, which can cost several thousand dollars to install, are an added expense for an already expensive state — and seen by some as the cost of climate change.
The shut-offs were an added challenge for families already dealing with distance learning because of the pandemic. In some communities online classes were canceled because of the power outages. Even some households with generators had trouble connecting to the internet. Comcast, the internet provider, said the blackouts had affected its equipment, causing 100,000 households to lose their internet connections.
In Southern California, outages have been much less extensive.
“We’ve broken our grid up so we can do smaller shut-offs to our customers,” said Taelor Bakewell, an Edison spokeswoman.
PG&E, which emerged from bankruptcy in June after amassing $30 billion in liability from wildfires in recent years, has been widely criticized for its broad approach to cutting its customers’ power. On Sunday, the utility left 345,000 customers in the dark before beginning to restore power a day later.
But the approach PG&E took over the last few days, the most widespread power shut-off this year, appears to have worked. There have been no reports of fires caused by PG&E’s equipment during the latest power shut-offs, which were prompted by extreme weather events in Northern California.
Tim Arango reported from Los Angeles, Ivan Penn from Burbank, Calif., and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from New York. Ana Facio-Krajcer contributed reporting from Irvine, Calif., Thomas Fuller from Moraga, Calif., and John Schwartz from West Orange, N.J.
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