A wildfire in northern California’s Napa Valley wine country that burned down the Chateau Boswell has more than quadrupled in size overnight to 11,000 acres and thousands of residents awoke to mandatory evacuation orders on Monday.

The blaze, since named the Glass Fire, ignited at 3.50am Sunday near Calistoga, about 60 miles north of San Francisco, and was fanned through the area’s famed vineyards by dry wind gusts. 

The subsequent Shady and Boysen fires merged with Glass, burning 17 square miles as of early Monday, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. 

Video footage from the Napa Sheriff’s Office showed authorities driving through the area to make sure residents had evacuated to safety after more than a thousand firefighters have struggled to contain the flames.

 Two thousand people in California‘s Napa Valley wine growing area have been ordered to evacuate their homes, and another 3,000 have been told to prepare to.   

 The Glass Fire began Sunday but firefighters reported three other conflagrations in the area Monday morning, which they were dealing with as one large blaze that quickly burned more than 1,000 acres, destroying an unknown number of homes. 

The Chateau Boswell was established in 1979 by the late Richard Boswell and is currently run by Susan Boswell. It’s one of the handful of family-run private wineries in the region and contributes to the Napa region’s quality wine reputation.

As well as the destruction of Chateau Boswell in the town of St. Helena, a castle-style tourist attraction farmhouse winery Castello di Amorosa, plus Merus Wines and Davis Estates were under imminent threat from the fast-moving flames. The Black Rock Inn bed and breakfast was also up in flames.

Firefighters were deploying 133 engines, 22 water tenders, five helicopters and 35 bulldozers, the Napa Valley Register said.

The Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) company cut electricity to 65,000 homes in northern California as a precaution.

Early on Monday, new evacuation orders were issued in Sonoma and Napa counties, including parts of the cities of Santa Rosa – the most populated place in Sonoma County with 177,000 residents – and St. Helena. 

More than 8,500 homes and other buildings were threatened. 

The National Weather Service has issued a Red Flag Warning through to the end of Monday, forecasting low humidity and gusts of wind up to 55 miles per hour through certain canyons.

Napa Sheriff’s Office said that warning means there’s a potential threat to life and/or property.

The fire also prompted the evacuation of the 151-bed Adventist Health St. Helena hospital on Sunday for a second time in a few weeks after lightning-sparked blazes swept through the area in August.

It was the latest inferno in a historically destructive year throughout the US West. 

In California alone, wildfires so far have scorched more than 3.7 million acres, far exceeding any single year in state history. 

Since August 15, 8,100 fires in the state have killed 26 people and destroyed more than 7,000 structures. Climate change has contributed to wildfires’ growing intensity, scientists say.

High winds, gusting at 55mph, were hampering attempts to put out the Glass Fire, which broke out at 3:50am on Sunday and has so far burned 2,500 acres near St. Helena.

St. Helena, around 15 miles north of Napa, has been the site of prized wineries since the 1860s. The area is home to Beringer, one of California’s oldest continuously operating wineries, founded by Jacob Beringer and his brother Frederick in 1875. Some wines produced in the region sell for more than $460 a bottle. 

‘We saved the winery last night, but everything else was lost,’ Tuck Beckstoffer, president of a 20-acre vineyard near St Helena, told Wine Spectator magazine on Monday. 

The wine country has been scarred by terrible fires in recent years, including the 2017 Tubbs Fire that killed 22 people and destroyed more than 5,600 homes and other buildings. 

The area is also flanked by the LNU Lightning Complex, which was sparked on August 17 and has destroyed 363,000 acres. It is now 98 per cent contained – unlike the Glass Fire, which is entirely uncontained. 

County emergency management officials say 743 homes and 1,857 people are within the Glass Fire evacuation zone, the Press Democrat reported.

A further 1,370 homes and 3,425 people are in the larger evacuation warning zone. 

Some were evacuated from their homes before dawn, and evacuations continued throughout the day.

Among those evacuated were 50 patients at Adventist Health St. Helena hospital in Deer Park. 

It was the second wildfire-related evacuation of the 151-bed hospital in a month, after a massive cluster of lightning-sparked blazes that swept several counties north of the San Francisco Bay region in August. 

Fourteen sheriffs deputies from Napa County went door-to-door telling people to evacuate, using high-low sirens to alert residents.

The cause of the fire is being investigated and there were no immediate reports of injuries.

The blaze erupted midway through the traditional grape-harvesting period in the Napa Valley, world renowned as one of California’s premiere wine-producing regions. 

The area’s 475 wineries account for just 4 per cent of the state’s total annual grape harvest but half of the retail value of all California wines sold, according to the Napa Valley Vintners trade group.

Of Napa’s 16 wine-growing districts, or sub-appellations, the Howell Mountain area may have faced the greatest threat, said Lisa Covey, a spokeswoman for Hall Family Wines, which kept open during the day all its three tasting rooms in the county.

Napa and other wine-growing regions have been hit by wildfires in and around the Bay area for several years. Susan Krausz, co-owner of Arkenstone Estate Vineyards in the Howell Mountain community of Angwin, said it would take days or weeks to assess the impact of the latest blaze on valley vintners.

‘Most people have harvested,’ she said, but added, ‘Any time’s a bad time for a fire.’

Tom Kaljian, 78, a realtor who owns a house about halfway between Calistoga and St. Helena, defied evacuation orders to spend the day with his wife hosing down their home and dry brush along a fence line separating their property from the Silverado Trail, a key north-south roadway.

‘We were told to get out of here, but I was trying to protect our little abode, so we stayed,’ he told Reuters by telephone.

After firefighters told him the house was no longer in danger, he added, ‘I stopped watering at that point, and came in and took a nap.’ 

‘We are very concerned tonight about red flag conditions,’ said Janet Upton, spokeswoman for the Napa County Office of Emergency Services.

She said that many of the communities were isolated and reached via narrow, winding mountain roads, which made the decision to evacuate more pressing.

Upton said the dry conditions and high winds were worrying firefighters. 

‘There’s been discussion of relative humidity in elevations in the fire area as low as 0 per cent — and kiln-dried wood is at 9 per cent,’ Upton said. 

‘That factor alone, without the winds, would drive dangerous fire behavior.’ 

The spectacular 100-year-old Davis Estate winery, with its beautiful wooden tasting room, was considered under threat. 

So too was Reverie, founded 25 years ago on a lush Napa hillside.

Photos posted on social media showed planes flying above the Davis Estate, dropping fire retardant chemicals to try and protect the property.

Cal Fire used a DC10 plane, which was capable of dropping almost 10,000 gallons of retardant in eight seconds on each pass. 

The wine country has been scarred by terrible fires in recent years, including the 2017 Tubbs Fire that killed 22 people and destroyed more than 5,600 homes and other buildings. 

Louisville was virtually deserted Sunday evening amid curfews to control protests after a grand jury declined to charge officers in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor.

Mayor Greg Fischer had urged people to begin heading home about an hour before the curfew was set to begin at 9pm as the protesters continued to gather.

Taylor, 26, was shot multiple times March 13 after her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired at officers who had entered her home during a narcotics raid, authorities said. Sgt Jonathan Mattingly, Detective Myles Cosgrove and Officer Brett Hankison burst down the door to Taylor’s home during a ‘no knock’ search warrant. 

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said Wednesday there was no evidence to support that Mattingly, who was shot, was hit by friendly fire from other officers.

But the ballistics report seems to contradicts that finding, Vice reports. It states the 9mm bullet that hit Mattingly was neither ‘identified nor eliminated as having been fired’ from Walker’s gun ‘due to limited markings of comparative value’. 

Walker’s attorney Steve Romines said records show Hankison, the only officer facing charges for wanton endangerment, had also been issued with a weapon matching fellow officer’s gunshot wound, The Courier Journal reports.   

A crowd had earlier marched in Louisville’s streets chanting ‘Breonna Taylor, say her name’ on Sunday. 

The Kentucky city that has seen more than 120 days of demonstrations over the death of the 26-year-old black woman in a police raid gone wrong. 

Earlier in the day, people were gathered at Jefferson Square Park, which has come to be called ‘Breonna’s park’ by demonstrators, as speakers condemned the grand jury’s decision, The Courier Journal reported. 

As a crowd gathered outside the First Unitarian Church late Saturday, fires were set in a street nearby after 11 p.m. Police said fireworks burned a car, and windows had been broken at Spalding University and Presentation Academy buildings close by.

Some demonstrators were seen with makeshift shields made of plywood. Others took shelter inside the church, which closed its doors around midnight.   

As of the 2:20 a.m. tweet, 28 people had been arrested, the police department said. Later, police corrected the number of people arrested to 25.

A previous protest on Friday night was peaceful though police arrested 22 people for curfew violations. A police spokesman said some also were charged with failure to disperse.

It comes amid reports the police officer facing wanton endangerment charges over Taylor’s death was ‘visibly shaking after the shooting’.

Former police chief Steve Conrad, who was also fired over the botched raid, said Det. Brett Hankison immediately feared losing his job in the wake of the incident. 

Conrad said he met Hankison at the hospital shortly after the shooting. In an interview five days after the raid he said: ‘You know, not kinda – not scared – not scared but that – that kind of nervous sort of energy that you have after – after something traumatic, you know, happens.’

He said he reassured Hankison, who was worried about losing his job, ‘we’ll work through this’.   

Conrad said seeing Hankison at the hospital was ‘so contrary from what I’ve seen in previous officer-involved shootings’, adding: ‘My experience is they are brought to the Public Integrity by, you know, members of – of this unit.’ 

He said he was initially told that ‘the woman was in fact the shooter’, Fox News reports.  

Taylor’s boyfriend Walker said he didn’t know who was coming in and fired in self-defense. 

On Wednesday, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron announced a grand jury indicted Hankison on wanton endangerment charges, saying he fired gunshots into a neighboring home during the raid that didn’t strike anyone. 

Hankison has been fired.

Sgt Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove were not charged. 

Cameron said the other officers were not charged with Taylor’s killing because they acted to protect themselves. 

Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, visited a downtown park on Friday with family and her lawyers, and called on Kentucky officials to release all body camera footage, police files and the transcripts of the grand jury proceedings. 

Palmer said in a statement read by a family member that she felt the criminal justice system had failed her. Palmer marched at the head of Friday’s protest march.  

Footage – obtained by Vice magazine on Saturday – shows inside Taylor’s Louisville apartment after she was fatally shot. 

According to Vice, the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department has ‘insisted’ that no bodycam footage exists of the actual raid itself. 

However, they were able to obtain vision recorded by other officers and SWAT team members who responded to the shooting. 

The publication shared two short clips, with the first showing an officer threatening to release a barking narcotics dog on Walker as he stands outside the apartment complex.  

The footage then shows Officer Hankison and another policeman placing Walker in handcuffs. Walker was charged for attempted murder after striking Mattingly in the leg. The charge was later dropped.

Meanwhile, a second video – recorded on the same night – shows Hankison inside Taylor’s apartment after the shooting took place.  Vice claims that is a violation of police investigation procedure. 

In the clip, Hankison can be heard asking a SWAT team member about shell casings seen on the ground. 

The SWAT officer sounds uncomfortable and orders Hankison to leave the scene. 

‘I’d back out until they get PIU in here,’ he states, referring to the Public Integrity Unit, which is responsible for investigating officer-involved shootings.  

New York City is bracing for another round of crippling shutdowns as eight neighborhoods experience ‘alarming’ surges in coronavirus infection rates.  

It comes as New York state recorded a positivity rate of 1.5 percent on Sunday – the highest it’s been since mid-July. 

Gov Andrew Cuomo announced the latest positivity rate at a press conference on Monday, saying that spikes in the Big Apple were a ‘big contributor’. 

He said that the state is ramping up efforts to keep the pandemic under control by sending in additional health department officers to high risk areas to ensure ‘additional testing and compliance measures’.  

‘It’s very targeted and focused on those clusters,’ Cuomo said of the state’s heightened efforts.  

Health officials warned about the emergence of COVID-19 clusters in several communities across Queens and Brooklyn last week, saying that they would begin rolling back reopenings in affected areas as early as Monday if the numbers don’t improve. 

As of Sunday, eight neighborhoods with large Orthodox Jewish populations were identified as potential targets for an ‘immediate scaling back of activities’, which may include bans on gatherings of 10 or more people, mask fines and the closure of non-essential businesses. 

The highest increase in infections came in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, where the positivity rate hit 17 percent on Sunday, according to city data.  

Other problems areas include Edgemere / Far Rockaway (14 percent), Gravesend / Homecrest (12.14 percent), Flatlands/Midwood (11 percent), Gerritsen Beach / Homecrest / Sheepshead Bay (10.82 percent), Midwood (9 percent), Bensonhurst / Mapleton (9 percent), and Kew Gardens (6 percent).  

The average positivity rate across those eight neighborhoods – which now account for 23 percent of New York City’s more than 238,000 cases – is 3.3 percent higher than the city’s overall positivity rate, which came in at 1.3 percent on Friday.    

New York state’s positivity hovered around one percent for an entire month before seeing a troubling increase over the past week.  

From late July through the start of September the state was seeing an average of around 660 people test positive per day. 

In the seven-day period that ended Friday, the state had averaged 817 positive tests per day.

On Saturday the state reported more than 1,000 new cases for the first time since early June, prompting Cuomo to warn that the virus ‘remains a force to be reckoned with throughout the country’. 

In recent days Cuomo and his aides have highlighted the importance of containing clusters to ensure that they don’t spread to neighboring zip codes. 

In addition to the neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, Cuomo said that surges in the mid-Hudson region were pushing up the state’s positivity rate. 

He outlined eight zip codes in the state with troubling rates. 

In Rockland County, 30 percent of tests came back positive in 10977 on Sunday and 25 percent came back positive in 10952. 

In Orange County, the 10950 zip code had a positivity rate of 22 percent.   

In Brooklyn, the worst zip codes were: 11219 (17 percent positive), 11210 (11 percent positive), 11204 (9 percent positive), 11230 (9 percent positive). 

In Queens, the worst zip code was 11367 (6 percent positive).

Cuomo said that zip codes ranking in the top ten ‘represent 2.9 percent of the state’s population and 25 percent of the cases’. 

DailyMail.com has reached out to the governor’s office about the two top 10 zip codes Cuomo did not mention during his press conference.   

Once the epicenter of the US coronavirus crisis, New York City was quick to go into lockdown in the spring before slowly rolling back restrictions over the course of the summer.  

The city has taken several big steps to returning to normal this month, including by reopening public schools for in-person classes and preparing for the return of limited indoor dining on October 1. 

However emerging infection trends in parts of Brooklyn and Queens – compounded with fears of the forthcoming flu season exacerbating COVID-19’s strain on hospitals – have threatened to derail that progress.

As of Sunday, New York City has recorded 238,338 cases, 19,178 confirmed deaths and 4,632 probable deaths. 

Those tallies account for roughly half of the 455,626 cases and the majority of the 25,456 deaths across the state of New York. 

Many of the neighborhoods identified as having troubling infections rates are home to large numbers of Jewish residents.  

Dr Mitchell Katz, the CEO of New York City’s public healthcare system, said the city would distribute masks, gloves and hand sanitizer while officials will ask religious leaders to reinforce key public health messages.  

Robocalls in English and Yiddish and sound trucks will urge residents to physically distance and wear a face covering, Katz said.  

Katz also stressed the importance of complying with limits on social gatherings, which were flagrantly ignored by attendees of a wedding in Woodside, Queens, on Friday night.  

Deputies arrived at Royal Elite Palace Caterers on Garfield Avenue just before midnight on Friday night and found about 284 people inside – exceeding the state limit of 50 people at social gatherings. 

The sheriff’s office said a live band was playing and food and alcohol were being served while guests ignored social distancing guidelines.  

The crowd was ordered to leave the event hall immediately, and the owner and manager of the venue were ticketed for misdemeanor offenses.  

Royal Elite owner Aba Cohen was cited for violating the mayor’s emergency coronavirus measure and unlawfully altering the nature or character of a business. 

Manager Paata Sichinava was cited for four similar offenses.    

Mayor Bill de Blasio warned of potential new lockdowns in neighborhoods with surges at a press conference on Friday, saying: ‘It’s something we have to address with a very aggressive public health effort right away.’ 

De Blasio said that the lockdowns could include the closure of schools in affected areas – throwing yet another wrench into the city’s disastrous road to reopening for in-person classes. 

New York City public schools began welcoming students back in the classroom on a rolling basis earlier this month, despite concerns from parents and educators. 

At least 150 district employees have already tested positive for the virus, including 108 who came in contact with infected colleagues, according to the New York Post.

The city’s Department of Education has refused to disclose the total number of teachers and administrators who have been quarantined for 14 days since returning to school buildings on September 8, but the Post came up with its estimate based on reports from teachers themselves.   

On Sunday, a union representing more than 6,4000 educators in New York City declared a unanimous vote of ‘no confidence’ in de Blasio and NYC Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza and demanded that they hand over control of the nation’s largest school district to the state.  

The stunning vote from the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators came two days before schools are set to resume in-person learning for students in grades K through 8 on Tuesday.

The union ripped into de Blasio and Carranza’s ‘failure to lead New York City through a safe and successful reopening of schools’ and demanded that they hand over control of the district to state officials. 

‘CSA calls on Mayor de Blasio to cede mayoral control of the Department of Education for the remainder of this health crisis and for Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza to seek the immediate intervention of the New York State Education Department,’ the union said in a statement.