A slew of wildfires continued to blaze through Northern California Tuesday morning, destroying structures in the region's wine country and forcing thousands to evacuate.
The fires, which have left at least 11 people dead, can even be seen from space, satellite imagery from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Monday shows.
Patches of flame and plumes of billowing smoke scores of miles long can be seen at the sites of several wildfires north of the San Francisco Bay.
In a nighttime image, the glow of the fires is as bright as city lights in San Francisco and Sacramento, and smoke can be seen rising from the Tubbs Fire, the Redwood Complex Fire and others.
At least a dozen fires in Northern California, driven by up to 55 mph winds, have torn across dozens of square miles, forcing more than 20,000 people to evacuate their homes. Area hospitals are treating at least 100 for fire-related injuries. Another fire has burned several homes in Orange County in Southern California.
Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in seven counties in the face of one of the most destructive set of fires in California's history.
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The high winds are expected to die down on Tuesday, but many parts of the state are still at high risk, Cal Fire said. The fires have scorched at least 73,000 acres so far.
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"Hopefully we'll start seeing some turnaround throughout the course of today and into tomorrow," Scott McLean, deputy chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, said Tuesday on NBC's "Today" show.
The fires have prompted than 100 missing-persons reports in Sonoma County alone, though an emergency operations official told NBC News that some were duplicates and others were already found.
