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WORLD> America
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Even as winds calm, more Californians flee fires
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-11-17 10:01 DIAMOND BAR, Calif. -- More residents of Southern California were urged to leave their homes Sunday despite calming winds that allowed a major aerial attack on wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of homes and blanketed the region in smoke.
Fires burned in Los Angeles County, to the east in Riverside and Orange counties, and to the northwest in Santa Barbara County. More than 800 houses, mobile homes and apartments were destroyed by fires that have burned areas more than 34 square miles since breaking out Thursday. No deaths have been reported, but police brought in trained dogs Sunday morning to search the rubble of a mobile home park where nearly 500 homes were destroyed. No bodies had been found by midday. "This has been a very tough few days for the people of Southern California," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said after touring damage. The smell of smoke pervaded metropolitan Los Angeles. Downtown skyscrapers were silhouettes in an opaque sky, and concerns about air quality forced organizers to cancel a marathon in suburban Pasadena where 8,000 runners had planned to participate. Fierce Santa Ana winds that fanned the fires on Saturday weakened Sunday morning, allowing firefighters to set backfires to prevent flames from advancing to hillside neighborhoods. Air tankers swooped low over suburbs, red fire retardant billowing from their bellies as they painted defensive lines between brushlands and homes. Big helicopters shuttled back and forth on water drops. The most threatening blaze had scorched more than 16 square miles in Orange and Riverside counties after erupting Saturday and shooting through subdivisions entwined with wilderness parklands. By midday Sunday, multimillion-dollar homes were being threatened in Diamond Bar in Los Angeles County as the out-of-control fire pushed northward. Fire officials ordered 1,400 more residents to evacuate Sunday morning. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said 26,500 people remained under evacuation orders for that fire alone. Retired aerospace engineer Joe Gomez, who has lived in his palm-tree-lined Diamond Bar neighborhood for 45 years, stayed put despite being under a mandatory evacuation. "I'm trying to use some logic here," said Gomez, 72, trying to gauge the direction of the wind and flames. "I don't think it's going to come down this way." Gomez packed a bag with important documents in case he decided to leave. His wife, a stroke victim, left with their daughters earlier in the day. "My daughters were really thinking I was nuts. They said, `These are mandatory evacuations." I said, 'You guys just relax.'" In the early morning, winds pushed flames dangerously close to a church and adjacent mobile home park in the Olinda Village area north of Yorba Linda, but firefighters were able to beat it back. Only one mobile home was lost. Billy Bagsby, an inmate firefighter with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said the flames suddenly shifted direction around 2 am. "It was like the church was protecting itself," Bagsby said. On Saturday, the fire burned 119 homes in the communities of Corona, Yorba Linda and Anaheim. In addition, 50 units of an apartment complex burned, Orange County fire spokeswoman Angela Garbiso said. |
