Crews battling California wildfire make headway in third day of fair weather
LOS ANGELES: Crews battling a devastating California wildfi re that now ranks as the state’s secondlargest on record capitalised on a third straight day of favourable weather conditions on Tuesday as they made greater progress corralling the flames.
With the so- called Thomas fi re blazing into its third week in the coastal mountains, foothills and canyons of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties northwest of Los Angeles, officials scaled back evacuation orders, sent home some visiting fi refighters and reported improved air quality.
“I would definitely say things are looking better today than they have in the last two weeks,” Rudy Evenson, a spokesman for the incident command centre, told Reuters by telephone.
Higher humidity, combined with diminished winds and temperatures to ease fi refighters’ jobs since Sunday, but the region remains ‘critically dry’, a group of agencies said in a statement.
More than 1,000 homes and other buildings have gone up in flames and about 18,000 structures remained listed as threatened from a late-season fi restorm that kept crews on the defensive for the better part of two weeks.
One firefighter died last Thursday near the town of Fillmore in Ventura County.
Still, fire managers are ‘cautiously optimistic’ of having gained sufficient ground this week to protect populated areas against the return of high winds forecasted for yesterday and early today.
“We feel pretty confident about that for now,” Evenson added.
By Tuesday night, fi refi ghters had carved containment lines around 55 per cent of the blaze’s perimeter — up from 50 per cent earlier in the day. But the fi re has still spread by several hundred acres a day since the weekend.
In total the fire has scorched 272,000 acres of drought-parched chaparral and brush since igniting on Dec 4, covering an area equivalent to nearly a third of Rhode Island.
The latest tally makes the Thomas blaze one of the two largest single wildfires documented in California, second only to the 2003 Cedar fire in San Diego County, which consumed a record 273,246 acres and killed 15 people. — Reuters