Thomas fire nears record in California

Firefighters report 272,800-acre blaze is 65% contained.

VENTURA, CALIF. — Firefighters continued to make progress on the Thomas fire Friday as the monster inferno was within 500 acres of becoming the largest California wildfire on record.

As of Friday morning, the blaze was 65 percent contained after burning 272,800 acres, eclipsed only by the 2003 Cedar fire in San Diego County, which burned 273,246 acres.

This year is already the most destructive fire season on record in the state. In October, a series of fires in wine country burned more than 10,000 homes and killed more than 40 people.

Those blazes, along with the Thomas fire, were fueled by dry conditions and intense winds.

“Today is one of those days where our firefighters had to work hard to find smoke” and hot spots, Mark Brown, an operations section chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said Thursday evening.

Firefighters are still working on the hot spots they find — cooling them off, putting water on them, using their hand tools to stir them up — to ensure they are “gone, once and for all,” Brown said.

Firefighters are focusing on the north side of the blaze in the Highway 33 corridor near Hartman Ranch and the Bear Haven area, authorities said.

Depending on wind and weather conditions, firefighters plan to start a controlled burn near the highway with hopes that winds from the north will push the flames away from the highway and south toward the main body of the fire.

The burn operation could scorch up to 20,000 acres before it connects with the larger blaze, officials said.

The backfire operation began this week on the south side of Potrero Seco Road west of Highway 33 and is slowly crawling deeper into wilderness and toward the bigger Thomas fire footprint to the south, said Brandon Vaccaro, a spokesman for Cal Fire.

Crews prefer to burn a barrier into the forest to stop the Thomas fire’s spread so they don’t have to march in with boots and motor in with trucks and bulldozers that would create unnatural barriers for future plant growth, he said.

“In the wilderness, we try to do as little of that as possible,” he said.

The fire will “get some of that older vegetation and we’ll have a healthier environment. The fire is doing it naturally at our pace,” he said.

Despite its size, Thomas fire has been less destructive than either the wine country fires or the Cedar Fire, which destroyed 2,820 structures and killed 15 people.

The Thomas fire has destroyed more than 1,000 structures and has been associated with one death.