Crews fight ‘uphill battle’ near LA
California gusts fan fast-moving wildfire as 8,000 told to flee
LOS ANGELES — Firefighters struggled Friday to contain a Southern California wildfire amid shifting winds, forcing authorities to expand evacuations as forecasters extended f i re weather warnings into the weekend.
The blaze, dubbed the Maria fire, erupted late Thursday northwest of Los Angeles during what had been expected to be the tail end of a siege of Santa Ana winds that fanned destructively across the region, but a tug-of-war developed between those offshore gusts and the return of some onshore flow from the ocean.
“It has been an uphill battle ever since,” Ventura County Fire Chief Mark Lorenzen said. “We are finding that the winds are starting to change and that presents its own challenges all by itself.”
Wind shifts expose new areas of fuel to the fire, bringing “a pretty significant firefight,” he said.
The fire burned down the sides of a mountain bordered by agricultural land, the small city of Santa Paula and other communities as it grew to 14 square miles. Airplanes tried to flank it with retardant while helicopters dropped water.
Some 8,000 people were under evacuation orders and 2,300 structures were threatened, Sheriff Bill Ayub said.
Red Flag warnings for gusts and low humidity levels had been expected to expire Friday, but forecasters extended them to 6 p.m. local time Saturday for valleys and interior mountains of Ventura and Los Angeles counties.
“As recent fire activity has shown, this remains a dangerous environment for fire growth, even with weaker winds than earlier this week,” the National Weather Service wrote.
Elsewhere, the state was free of fire weather warnings and only a few hundred utility customers were awaiting restoration of power that was shut off to wide areas in an attempt to prevent blazes involving electrical equipment and strong winds.
In Northern California, more people were allowed to return to areas evacuated due to the huge Kincade fire burning for days in the Sonoma County wine country.
The 121-square-mile fire was 67% contained, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.
The tally of destroyed homes reached 167, and there were 33 more damaged, Cal Fire said. Many other structures also burned.
In Los Angeles, the last remaining evacuations were lifted in Brentwood, where a fire that erupted near The Getty Center arts complex roared into ridgetop and canyon neighborhoods and destroyed eight expensive homes.
In eastern Ventura County, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library reopened to the public after being forced to shut down Wednesday as a wind-driven wildfire swirled around the hilltop facility.
Firefighters were protecting avocado and citrus orchards and infrastructure, including radio communication facilities and high voltage electrical power lines.
For most of October, fires sprang up across the state, forcing residents to flee homes at all hours as flames indiscriminately burned barns, sheds, mobile homes and multimillion- dollar mansions.
Nearly 200,000 Sonoma County residents were allowed to return home even as the fire that forced them to evacuate continued to burn.
Brenda Catelani choked up as she recalled driving back home to Windsor with her husband.
Chunks of burnt embers, burned leaves and ash littered the outside of her house.
The fire had come within 500 yards of their house — closer than the wine country fires of 2017 that killed 44 people and destroyed 8,900 homes and other buildings in Sonoma and Napa counties.
“We feel extremely lucky,” Catelani said.
Evacuations were also lifted for two small fires, fed by gusts up to 60 mph, that destroyed homes Thursday in the heavily populated inland region east of Los Angeles. One of those blazes, in Jurupa Valley, was caused by dry grasses ignited when a stolen car chased by police tried to escape through fields.
The wildfires came even as many people were in the dark from the intentional outages.
In places where the power stayed on, utility lines and other electrical equipment were suspected or confirmed as the cause of several fires, including the one in Sonoma, another that started on a hillside above the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles and one that burned around the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley on Wednesday
Pacific Gas & Electric finished restoring power to dozens of counties in the north and central regions after a third round of shutoffs this week designed to protect power lines from being damaged or toppled by high winds and sparking fires.
The most devastating wildfires in California’s history have occurred in the past two years in the fall, fueled by a combination of built-up brush, dry conditions and extreme winds. The anniversary of the deadliest of those — last year’s fire that torched the town of Paradise and killed 85 — is next week.