Largest wildfire aims at coastal communities

Calmer winds cause for hope, but thousands evacuate.

VENTURA, CALIF. — Flames from the largest and most destructive Southern California wildfire churned toward coastal and mountain communities northwest of Los Angeles on Thursday, disrupting travel on a major highway and triggering more evacuations.

A more favorable wind forecast still called for potentially dangerous gusts, but ones not likely to approach historic levels forecasters had feared, according to the National Weather Service.

“This is good news for the fire crews as the winds will not be driven quite as vigorously,” a weather service statement said.

Calmer overnight conditions helped crews protect the Ventura County resort town of Oja, where most of the 7,000 residents were under new evacuation orders following a burst of wind late Wednesday.

At Ojai Valley Community Hospital, officials said they moved non-ambulatory patients to another hospital as a precaution. The hospital said in a statement that several dozen patients still remained there Thursday.

A woman was found dead

in a wrecked car in an evacuation zone near the city of Santa Paula, where the Ventura County fire began Monday night, but officials could not immediately say if the accident was fire-related.

To the west, firefighters prevented another disaster at tiny La Conchita, a seaside hamlet below coastal bluffs that in the past have unleashed destructive landslides, including one that killed 10 people in 2005.

A short distance up the coast, evacuations were ordered in Santa Barbara County for several hundred residents of the beach city of Carpinteria.

Officials intermittently closed U.S. 101 for more than a dozen miles along the coast, cutting off the major route for several hours as fire charred

heavy brush along lanes.

In tiny Faria Beach, homeowner Steve Andruszkewicz and his wife used a garden hose to spray palm trees.

“We’re leaving,” he said. “We’ve been packed up since Tuesday. We left Tuesday night and stayed down at our son’s house. We came back yesterday, stayed the night, but this has got me worrying because of the blowing embers.”

Resident Joseph Ruffner said he was staying.

“We evacuated the night before last, came home and the fire was down in that direction,” he said pointing north. “And this morning there was a wall of fire back right over here. And I didn’t think it was no big deal, but it’s coming back to burn what it didn’t burn yesterday.”

GENARO MOLINA / LOS ANGELES TIMES A firefighter walks near a swimming pool as a home is in flames from the Skirball fire along Linda Flora Drive in Bel Air on Wednesday.