The northern cali fires were caused by high winds dropping tree branches onto power lines due to the extremely long history of PG&E failing to conduct basic maintenance of tree trimming. The resulting blue explosions from transformers shorting out and exploding is the "lightning".

Power transformers are full of oil used as a coolant. When these things explode (which is very common) they leak out burning oil which is quite hard to extinguish.

Also, downed trees blocking main excess roads to these fires hampered response times of firefighters.

It all played out live over the publicly broadcasted scanner radios, and if you research the broadcastify.com archives and begin listening 5 minutes before the fire start time(all information available archived on calfire website), you will hear the shit the firefighters went though.