It’s impossible to divorce the 2019 fire season in Northern California from the two that came immediately before. Those were nothing short of disastrous, so much so that many Californians entered last summer filled with dread of a third consecutive year of incinerated homes, mass evacuations and tragic loss of life.

Last year, with those recent calamities haunting the state, officials took some unprecedented steps to avert a devastating repeat.

Did they work? Well, judging by the results tallied at the end of the year, something went right. The number of acres burned was the lowest since 2011, and the wildfire-related death toll dropped to three, down from the dozens of fatalities in both 2017 and 2018.

The most extreme preventive measure came from PG&E, the state’s largest utility, whose transmission line had sparked the 2018 Camp Fire that killed 85 people and destroyed nearly 14,000 homes. Last fall the company implemented several large-scale power shutoffs affecting up to 2 million people during periods of high-risk for wildfire, and the outages deprived some residents of electricity for as long as a week.

Emergency procedures evolved as well. During the Kincade Fire, the state’s largest of the year, officials forced about 200,000 residents out of their homes in reportedly the biggest evacuation in Sonoma County history. The magnitude of the response was prompted by major problems concerning emergency procedures during the devastating North Bay Fires of 2017.

“We did not want to repeat that experience,” Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin told KQED’s Lisa Pickoff-White in October. “So they evacuated large numbers of the population in Sonoma County early.”

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