California Wildfires Kill at Least 6 People
43 minutes ago
By Ben Berkowitz
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Wildfires raging in southern California on Sunday killed at least six people and destroyed 350 homes, and officials said there was no immediate end in sight as new fires continued to pop up.
Fanned by the hot, dry Santa Ana winds and minimal humidity, major fires were raging in about a half-dozen places, having already burned more than 100,000 acres, threatened more than 30,000 homes across the region and caused millions of dollars of damage.
California Gov. Gray Davis (news - web sites) declared a state of emergency in Ventura and San Bernardino counties, north and east of Los Angeles, respectively, and asked President Bush (news - web sites) to declare a "major disaster" for both areas.
The sky is absolutely yellow like Armageddon," Sarah Tippit, a Reuters reporter, said as she prepared to evacuate her home in the San Diego area, which is facing a rapidly-spreading set of fires. "It's filling our lungs. There's not anything that's stopping it."
A spokesman for Los Angeles International Airport, one of the world's busiest, said there were some delays at the airport because of the smoke being generated by the San Diego fires.
Both the Grand Prix blaze and the "Old" fire, named for the Old Waterman Canyon where it started, were believed to be the work of arsonists, state fire officials said.
Regional air quality authorities issued an advisory for broad swaths of the region, warning of unhealthy air due to the smoke and urging people to limit outdoor activities. Residents of the Hollywood Hills, about 40 miles southeast of the Ventura County fires, said they could smell the smoke.
The weather outlook for Sunday was not favorable, with the National Weather Service (news - web sites) forecasting temperatures in the high 80s and low 90s, with winds starting at 30 mph and gusting up to 60 mph.
"We've got weather conditions that we expect are going to continue like this in southern California into the middle of next week," Eric Lamoureux, a spokesman for the state office of emergency services, told Reuters.
He said the state has received assistance grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (news - web sites) to help defer some costs.
MANDATORY EVACUATIONS
Portions of major thoroughfares, including Interstate 15 and Interstate 210, were closed by the fires, and mandatory evacuations proceeded apace in communities all across the region.
One of the fires, known as the Grand Prix fire, was threatening power lines that supply about 25 percent of the Los Angeles basin's electricity.
That blaze was 23 percent contained as of Sunday morning, having already done more than $6 million in damage, according to the San Bernardino County Fire Department's Web site.
State officials did not have details on the deaths. Local television said one person died Saturday evacuating from the San Bernardino fire area and another died watching a house burn. There were also radio reports Sunday of at least four deaths at the San Diego fires.
Pictures from local TV helicopters flying over the scene showed the fire "hopscotching," or jumping erratically from home to home, with some houses burned to the ground while others remained untouched.
A major fire was also burning uncontained near the Simi Valley region of Ventura County, and Lamoureux said the widespread fires were stretching regional and statewide resources.
"It's kind of like a big chess game here," he said.
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OMG !! OMG!! OMG!!
I pray all people, animals, trees, plants... etc !! I pray for Hard Rain !!
I am very sad !! I am really afraid for everybody !!
