After days of fire behavior that officials described as extreme and erratic, Southern California firefighters on Thursday said they were able to gain ground on major wildfires as weather conditions shifted in their favor.
Cooler temperatures — in the 80s instead of the 110s, as they were during a heat wave last week — and higher humidity levels on Thursday aided firefighting efforts against three major wildfires in the region that have burned down dozens of homes this week. Gusty winds had also died down.
“We do have a big weather break for us as firefighters today,” Jeremy Pierce, operations section chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said on Thursday. Chief Pierce is working on one of those major fires, the Line fire, which is blazing in the San Bernardino Mountains.
Firefighters sounded more confident Thursday than they had since these fires broke out several days ago. That was perhaps because the cooler, moister weather was expected to continue and to become even more likely to quash fires.
The National Weather Service’s San Diego office, which issues forecasts for San Bernardino and the other two counties where big fires were burning, Orange and Riverside, said that temperatures in the region would be around 5 to 10 degrees below average this weekend.
And when a strong low-pressure system moves in Monday, temperatures in the mountains could fall to as low as 25 degrees below normal, and could come with light rain from the coast to the mountains.
With the Line fire, which had spread to 37,000 acres as of Thursday afternoon, firefighters’ biggest concern had been that winds would help push the flames northeast, into the populated resort communities around Big Bear Lake.
But though the fire burned about 800 acres in that area on Wednesday, firefighters said on Thursday that they were confident it could be prevented from reaching the homes around Big Bear, where thousands have been forced to evacuate. The fire was 18 percent contained as of Thursday.
“We’re really holding our own at this point on the Line fire,” said Shannon D. Dicus, the San Bernardino County sheriff, in a news briefing on Thursday. “I think we’re going to see, as long as we don’t have any dramatic wind changes or weather changes, that you’ll be able to see our firefighters increasing that containment percentage.”
The state’s largest actively burning fire, the Bridge fire in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles, grew just 2,000 acres between Wednesday and Thursday. That’s a dramatic change from earlier in the week, when the blaze exploded from a few thousand acres in the Angeles National Forest to more than 48,000 in a matter of hours.
Fire officials said that fire, which has destroyed dozens of homes and remains entirely uncontained, was becoming less extreme, citing “favorable conditions due to decreased wind and elevated humidity levels.” Though the fire threatened the community of Piñon Hills, where about 7,000 people live, firefighters said the easing weather meant they were better able to protect homes there.
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