Cal Fire Battalion Chief Gino DeGraffenreid was about to jump back into his truck after loading a fleeing family into a police car when he thought he heard someone yelling amid the roaring wind and fire in the hills northeast of Santa Rosa. 
 
 He ran toward the voice and saw them: a couple wearing next to nothing, freezing amid an unprecedented fire belching smoke and raining firebrands. 
 
 “They were soaking wet,” DeGraffenreid said. “They had awoken to a smoke detector, jumped in the pool and for about an hour had been in the pool trying to stay away from heat.” 
 
 He wrapped them in T-shirts, put them into his truck and caravaned with police down Michele Way to Mark West Springs Road, a white-knuckle trip with fire and intense heat — a burning neighborhood already wiped clean of all that had once been so familiar. 
 
 “All of the landmarks — the houses, the fences, the goofy Volkswagen bug — all of the visual landmarks were gone,” DeGraffenreid said. 
 
 Gale-force winds fueled an unprecedented number of wildfires that started almost simultaneously after night fell Oct. 8 in places across the North Coast region, killing at least 40 people in four counties and forcing entire communities to evacuate, including about 50,000 Sonoma County residents. 
 
 The battle to contain fires covering more than 178,000 acres across the region continues still. 
 
 Tracing the start of what’s now called the Tubbs fire — named for its origin near Tubbs Lane just north of the Calistoga city limits — shows how one fire overwhelmed emergency personnel, erupting amid Diablo winds on a Sunday night when many were asleep. 
 
 In just over four hours, the Tubbs fire made a horrific 12-mile run from Calistoga, in the northern edge of the Napa Valley, into a dense city neighborhood in west Santa Rosa. It raced through ranches and rural communities, sweeping through million-dollar homes in Santa Rosa’s hillside Fountaingrove development and tract neighborhoods in Larkfield-Wikiup. At 2 a.m., the ferocity of the firestorm propelled it across Highway 101, an unprecedented leap that spread flames into a commercial district on Cleveland Avenue and hundreds of tightly packed homes in Coffey Park. 
 
 The fire traveled at a pace of about 3 mph, burning up about an acre a minute while spewing burning embers a half-mile or more ahead, forcing entire neighborhoods to flee in the middle of the night. 
 
 “For a fire to move that fast is incredible,” said Eric Hoffman, a retired assistant chief with Cal Fire who rejoined the state fire agency to help manage the firefight and later calculated the fire’s speed. 
 
 Authorities have said nothing about what caused the fire. 
 
 Erratic winds 
 
 One week ago, as dry, strong winds began to buffet the region after night fell, fires began erupting in a chaotic pattern across Sonoma County, like bombs going off in every direction. 
 
 Flames engulfed a home on Mark West Station Road near the Sonoma County Airport. An electrical box was smoking on Maverick Court in the hills above Larkfield. Officers went door to door in Santa Rosa’s West End neighborhood as a Pierson Street home burned. 
 
 The 50 mph winds flung branches every which way and knocked drought-stricken trees off weakened roots, combining with downed power lines to block major roads from Highway 101 in Sonoma County to Highway 128 north of Calistoga. ||||| Both wildfires and tornadoes are pretty terrifying things by themselves, but together? Next level. 
 
 During the most recent deadly wildfire that broke out in central Portugal on Oct. 6, local firefighters managed to capture the natural phenomenon known as a "fire tornado" or "fire whirl." 
 
 The fires, which started near Pampilhosa da Serra and spread to the city of Arganil, have killed at least 41 people. More than a hundred have now been killed in fires in the country over the last four months. ||||| Want to see something so truly terrifying that it will put this whole White House-Russia debacle into perspective? Of course you do. 
 
 No, it's not the car that got wrecked by eel slime in Oregon. It's a fire tornado. 
 
 ABC 7 reporter Steve Douglass was covering a fire near the Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport in northern Texas on Thursday when he caught a fire whirl on camera. Fire whirls are exactly what they sound like, taking place whenever flames get whipped up by wind and begin to suck in debris. 
 
 Authorities quickly got the Amarillo blaze under control, but Douglass left with an impressive clip that soon went viral. Though firenadoes, as they're sometimes called, aren't very rare, the chance to record them on video is, according to National Geographic. 
 
 And because this is 2017 and everything is awful, the Texas video wasn't even the only fire tornado caught on camera this month. In California, where there were 15 wildfires burning across the state, the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at the University of Nevada made a time-lapse of a fire whirl near Oroville, according to KXTV. 
 
 "The one reason why this might be kind of spectacular is it represents this leading-edge vortices, or what some people call a 'firenado,'" lab director Graham Kent told SF Gate. "The heat blows up. It's hot. It burns." 
 
 Though arguably less scary than a Sharknado, fire tornadoes are no joke. Inside, their cores can be up to 2,000 degrees hot, and they can grow to 1,000 feet tall. Even studying them can be difficult: In 2014, 13 people were wounded after a fire tornado experiment being put on in a muesum exploded. 
 
 As such, researchers have struggled with how best to fight them in recent years. Videos like the ones circulating online this week may help with that. 
 
 "Decisions are being made with our footage," Kent told SF Gate. ||||| ‘Like a blowtorch’: Powerful winds fueled tornadoes of flame in Tubbs Fire 
 
 The firestorm flipped over cars, like one on Dogwood Drive in the devastated Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa. The firestorm flipped over cars, like one on Dogwood Drive in the devastated Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa. Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 83 Caption Close ‘Like a blowtorch’: Powerful winds fueled tornadoes of flame in Tubbs Fire 1 / 83 Back to Gallery 
 
 The Tubbs Fire that raged through Santa Rosa last week unleashed a series of fiery tornadoes powerful enough to flip cars, yank trees out of the ground and rip homes apart, fire scientists said Wednesday. 
 
 Gusts of up to 73 mph were recorded at the weather stations after the fires broke out Oct. 8, but the extraordinary damage documented during postmortem evaluations indicated that much more powerful forces were at play. 
 
 “We had trees ripped out of the ground, cars turned over, garage doors ripped off their hinges and wrapped around trees in the front yards,” said Scott Upton, the northern region chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and an expert on fire behavior. “It was no different than a hurricane, really, but instead of rain we had a fire event. I’ve been in this business 30 years and it’s the worst I’ve seen.” 
 
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 Time-lapse video shows smoke over Bay Area Media: Lawrence Hall of Science, edited by UC Berkeley 
 
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 Berkeley firefighter video Media: KTVU 
 
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 Before and after images of the North Bay fires Media: Ted Andersen, SFGATE 
 
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 A look inside a NorCal wildfire evacuation center Media: KCRA 
 
 Friday morning update on the fire conditions in Mendocino County Media: KTVU 
 
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 Sonoma County deputy drives through Tubbs Fire Media: KSBW 
 
 Helicopter footage of damage from Tubbs Fire Media: Melody Gutierrez 
 
 Old Fountaingrove neighborhood destroyed by Tubbs Fire Media: Alex Washburn, San Francisco Chronicle 
 
 Family on Shallow Creek Dr. in Santa Rosa loses home Media: Alex Washburn, San Francisco Chronicle 
 
 Son: Calif. Fire Victims Were Married 75 Years Media: Associated Press 
 
 Napa resident talks about evacuating due to fire Media: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle 
 
 Paras Vineyards goes up in flames Media: San Francisco Chronicle 
 
 Charisse Desmarais searches her remains of her mother's home Media: Lea Suzuki, San Francisco Chronicle 
 
 View of Tubbs Fire damage from SMART train Media: San Francisco Chronicle 
 
 Aerial view of mobile home park, hotel destroyed in Tubbs Fire Media: Elijah Nouvelage, Special to The Chronicle 
 
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 Wildfires ravage Santa Rosa Media: Tayfun Coskun, Anadolu Agency/Getty Images 
 
 Atlas fire victims describe inferno in Napa county Media: Peter Fimrite, San Francisco Chronicle 
 
 Tubbs Fire devastates parts of Santa Rosa Media: Lizzie Johnson 
 
 Santa Rosa businesses burn in Tubbs Fire Media: Kurtis Alexander 
 
 Half of Santa Rosa neighborhood suffers fire damage, the other does not Media: KTVU 
 
 A structure burns in Napa Media: San Francisco Chronicle 
 
 Santa Rosa mobile home park destroyed by fire Media: Gabrielle Lurie, San Francisco Chronicle 
 
 Structures burning on Patrick Rd. Media: Noah Berger, Special to the Chronicle 
 
 Upton said fire whirls, also known as fire tornadoes, probably happened in all the North Bay fires, but the most destructive evidence was found in Santa Rosa neighborhoods flattened by the Tubbs Fire, which has killed at least 22 people and burned 36,432 acres. Recovery teams are still searching for remains in the rubble. 
 
 The homes destroyed in the city’s Fountaingrove and Coffey Park neighborhoods burned in rapid succession. As flames driven by powerful winds slammed into the neighborhoods, the heat rose up, pulling the wind with it and creating a kind of vortex of air that circled around at hurricane-force speeds. 
 
 “Think about the massive release of heat in a fire like that, and then the wind gets obstructed by homes and you get the eddying,” Upton said. “The hot air mixes with cooler air, and that’s when it will start to turn, creating a fire whirl.” 
 
 The whirling winds blew fire sideways into homes in Santa Rosa, peeled off roofs, and even lifted and turned vehicles. Survivors recounted running out of their homes into the equivalent of a blast furnace, with embers flying everywhere amid a terrible gale. 
 
 “They can be incredibly powerful if you add more heat or wind or fuel, like in this fire,” he said. 
 
 Upton compared the situation to Lake County’s Rocky Fire in August 2015, when superheated flames, fueled by dry brush, sent huge clouds of smoke as far as 35,000 feet into the atmosphere, where they actually formed ice caps, pushing out wind in every direction. 
 
 In the Tubbs Fire, superheated air also lifted off the ground and created wind, but that’s where the similarities end. 
 
 Upton said fire tornadoes normally occur in open spaces, kind of like the way dust devils form on farmland and fields. He said the the 2003 Cedar Fire, which burned 280,000 acres, destroyed 2,232 homes and killed 15 people in San Diego County, is the closest comparison. 
 
 Just like the Wine Country blazes, the Cedar Fire spread rapidly as a result of Santa Ana winds and fire tornadoes. The 1991 Oakland Hills Fire, which killed 25 people and destroyed 3,500 houses, also created its own weather — a firestorm. 
 
 Fire whirls can be extremely violent. They have been known to lift all-terrain vehicles off the ground. In 1926, a fire whirl in San Luis Obispo lifted an entire home into the air and carried it across a field before dropping it. Two people were killed. 
 
 The phenomenon can’t happen without strong winds and dry fuel, which have been in abundance throughout Northern California. 
 
 The night the fires started on Oct. 8, the winds were a steady 40 mph, pushing flames east to west through a valley in the hills along Petrified Forest and Mark West Springs roads, feeding it like oxygen nourishes a torch, and driving it into the flatland neighborhoods. 
 
 “Just like water flows from higher to lower elevation, winds flow down a pressure gradient as they go from high pressure to low pressure,” said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist with the UC Cooperative Extension. “When they get concentrated, like through a mountain pass, they will speed up, like a river going through a narrow channel.” 
 
 Moritz said powerful winds also drove the Hanley Fire, which burned almost the exact same area in 1964. 
 
 That fire, which ignited when a hunter discarded a cigarette, burned 83,000 acres over a week and leveled 84 homes, 24 summer cabins and countless farm buildings; included was the historic Tubbs Mansion. Nobody was killed in the fire, which was finally halted on the north perimeter of Santa Rosa, but those who fought it were traumatized. 
 
 “This is the craziest fire I’ve ever seen,” Grant King, the chief of the Guerneville Fire Department, told The Chronicle at the time. “The wind just hangs back, then fire comes in a rush with the wind, and you’re dead.” 
 
 The wind-driven Tubbs Fire shot out of the same canyon into Fountaingrove and Coffey Park. 
 
 “It was a very different kind of fire that happened Sunday night,” said Ken Pimlott, the director of Cal Fire. “The fire was almost horizontal. When it hit those homes it was like a blowtorch. With all those fires burning, it generated so much heat that it created its own circular patterns.” 
 
 Upton said the Atlas Fire, which blasted through Napa Valley homes and wineries, threw embers way out in front, causing spot fires, and also occasionally formed fire whirls, but it didn’t display as much wind power as the Tubbs Fire did. 
 
 “I've seen fires melt cars and literally reduce them to little more than metal and aluminum pooled on the ground,” he said, but he hadn’t seen destruction like he saw last week. “To flip a car over has to be some significant winds.” 
 
 Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com ||||| A twisting column of fire known as a “fire devil” leapt out of a wildfire in Portugal, making an already scary-looking blaze appear even more dangerous. 
 
 Just as California has been battling wildfires in recent days, these forest blazes have cropped up in Portugal too. On Sunday in Portugal, the high winds swept up some of the flames into a swirling vortex called a fire devil, but also known as a fire whirl or a fire tornado. 
 
 The latter name, while it may seem visually proper, is not entirely accurate — the phenomenon is closer to a fiery version of a dust devil than a tornado. Dust devils are thin spirals of air that form in hot and windy conditions — when a certain spot on the ground is hotter than those around it, it heats up adjacent air that then rises upward and can be thrown into a sideways rotation if a blast of air hits it from the right angle. The spiral picks up small material like dust as it twists up. 
 
 With a fire devil, there is a similar underlying process: A particularly hot area on the ground makes heated air rise and, with a blast of wind, creates a swirling column of air that carries things upward from the ground — in this case, fire and ash. 
 
 “I would just call them fire vortices but that doesn’t sound so sexy to the public, so I would call them fire devils,” climatologist Mark Wysocki said, according to Live Science. “These plumes form in a very small region over the land. … They start to rise very rapidly, and as things start to rise, they suck the surrounding air in like a vacuum. Then you get this twisting that begins to resemble a vortex.” 
 
 The higher it goes, the thinner and faster it gets. 
 
 Tornadoes, on the other hand, are much larger and form during thunderstorms. While scientists don’t completely understand the processes behind the funnel’s formation, it could be related to sections of atmosphere with different conditions meeting one another, like different wind speeds, moisture levels and temperatures. 
 
 Fire devils are not common occurrences but can whirl up during a wildfire because of the heat and wind conditions during those events. They occur in dry areas, such as when a place gets little rainfall. When the vegetation is dried out enough, a spark from a strike of lightning, a poorly controlled campfire or a smoldering cigarette butt can set plants ablaze, with high winds helping to spread the flames. 
 
 Wildfires can create walls of flame that reach dozens of feet into the air. The heat from the fire is intense, one of the many hazards to human life and anything else in its path. 
 
 The Express reported that Portugal has seen numerous wildfires this year, due to a dry and hot summer. That includes five large fires around the nation this weekend, which about 1,000 firefighters were trying to control. One blaze in June killed 64 people, some of them on a bridge that caught fire.
– Like earthquakes can unleash tsunamis, strong winds and the California wildfires apparently set loose another type of natural disaster: fire tornadoes. And the San Francisco Chronicle says the fire-filled tornadoes that hit Santa Rosa last week, driven by nearly 80mph winds, wreaked major havoc, tossing cars, pulling trees out of the ground, and ripping the roofs off of houses. "I've been in this business 30 years and it's the worst I've seen," Scott Upton, a chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, says of the tornadoes created during the Tubbs Fire. The Chronicle explains the science behind the tornado formation: As powerful winds drive the fire's flames into neighborhoods, the heat rises and draws those gusts up with it, creating the tornado, or "fire whirl," a vortex of hot and cool air capable of mass destruction. This type of event, also referred to as a "fire devil," can be so strong it's capable of lifting an entire home in the air; the paper notes one such incident that took place in 1926. The location of the neighborhoods affected by the Tubbs Fire also exacerbated things: The wind sped up as it pushed the fire through a valley and toward residences, creating what Ken Pimlott, the head of CalFire, calls "a very different kind of fire." It was "almost horizontal," he says. "When it hit those homes, it was like a blowtorch." The Press Democrat details the Tubbs Fire's 12-mile "deadly march" from its point of origin in Calistoga to Santa Rosa. Curious to know what one of these frightening flame-storms looks like without getting too close? Mashable features a video, in which firefighters filmed a recent fire tornado raging through central Portugal. Newsweek has footage, too, out of California and Texas.