Firefighters keep a watch on the flames from the Cocos Fire in San Marcos. Photo: Reuters
San Diego: A towering wall of flames has charged a hillside California community as firefighters battled fierce wildfires that have forced 125,000 people to flee homes in the San Diego area. At least one person may have died.
Of nine major blazes burning across southern California, the so-called Cocos Fire posed the most immediate threat as it marched towards the communities of San Marcos and Escondido in northern San Diego County on Thursday night local time.
At least one home was burnt to the ground in San Marcos, and television images showed towering flames moving quickly towards other homes as residents scrambled to collect belongings and evacuate.
A resident waters the roof of his home as vegetation smoulders in Escondido. Photo: AP
Bright orange flames twisted in the wind, filling the sky with thick columns of black smoke. Fire engines, with lights flashing, moved along winding streets of the neighbourhoods of large Spanish-style homes.
The destructive cluster of fires comes as California enters its peak fire season amid its worst drought in decades. Officials worry it could be a particularly dangerous year.
Authorities said the fires had destroyed seven homes and an 18-unit apartment building across San Diego county. Seven other houses and two businesses were damaged.
Firefighters' attention was rapidly turning to protecting much larger Escondido. Photo: AP
Even as firefighters fought to keep flames at bay in San Marcos, their attention was rapidly turning to protecting much larger Escondido, as winds pushed flames south-east, forcing residents to flee and leaving the community's central business district eerily quiet.
"You have to leave behind everything you've built over a lifetime. We took what matters, the photos and our dog," Escondido resident Curt Trujillo said as he prepared to head out with his wife and teenage daughter. "This is very concerning and scary."
The roughly 485-hectare Cocos Fire was at least 5 per cent contained by late Thursday evening, Cal Fire said, and fire officials were aided by weakened winds and cooler temperatures overnight.
A US military helicopter drops water on a fire in San Marcos. Photo: Reuters
About 1600 San Marcos residents were allowed to return home to specific areas, the sheriff's department said early on Friday.
Elsewhere, a blaze that broke out on the Camp Pendleton Marine Base north of San Diego had charred some 2430 hectares.
A smaller 160-hectare fire in the coastal city of Carlsbad destroyed 18 apartments, seven homes and two commercial buildings and forced the evacuation of residents, along with the Legoland amusement park and 13 employees at the largely decommissioned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
Seven other homes and two businesses were damaged.
That blaze was 70 per cent contained on Thursday, allowing officials to lift most evacuation orders. But crews checking hot spots found a badly burnt body in a transient encampment. They could not immediately confirm the person was killed by the fire.
However, California State University's San Marcos campus, which has some 9000 students, and other areas remained under evacuation orders.
Elsewhere, a blaze that broke out on the Camp Pendleton Marine Base north of San Diego had charred some 2428-hectare.
Arson-related arrests made
Authorities said they would investigate how so many blazes started about the same time and whether any were intentionally set.
Late on Thursday, Escondido Police said they had arrested two teens, ages 17 and a 19-year-old, identified as Isaiah Silva, on arson-related charges after locating the pair near a mall. They matched descriptions by witnesses of two people trying to set fires in the South Escondido area.
Authorities elsewhere were also investigating how so many fires started about the same time and whether any were intentionally set.
"We all have suspicions, like the public does, when you have nine fires that started all over the county," San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore said. (Additional reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis and Dan Whitcomb; Writing by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Alison Williams, Gunna Dickson and Ken Wills)
Advancing development drives up cost of fighting wildfires
Raju Chebium 4:55 p.m. MDT May 15, 2014
(Photo: KUSA)
WASHINGTON – Increasing development in wilderness areas, especially in the West, is one reason why the federal government is shelling out more money to battle wildfires, experts say.
Suburbia's decades-long encroachment into forests and woods is sparking fresh concern because the blazes are getting bigger, deadlier and costlier to combat due to hot and dry conditions scientists attribute to climate change.
Uncle Sam is spending more to hire additional firefighters and deploy more helicopters, fire trucks, airplanes and other equipment to protect homes in "wildland-urban interfaces," experts say.
The interfaces are high-fire-risk regions where homes, subdivisions and communities butt up against chaparral, conifers and other flammable vegetation.
Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters Economics, an independent research group in Bozeman, Mont., said the federal government can't tell developers where to build – that's up to local governments – but is obligated to spend whatever it takes to fight wildfires and protect property.
"It is a classic case of a moral hazard, where you have created a risky situation and the risks and the consequences of the behavior are borne by somebody else," he said.
Earlier this month, the Obama administration predicted it will spend as much as $2.4 billion this fiscal year to fight wildfires.
That's almost three times more than what it cost a decade ago, Rasker said. Meanwhile, the number of people moving to wilderness communities has also tripled, he said.
With development occurring on only 16 percent of the land in 11 states west of the Dakotas -- a region that experiences the nation's biggest wildfires -- the "problem . . . is about to get many orders of magnitude worse," Rasker said.
A study released last year by CoreLogic Inc., a data provider for the real estate and financial industries, showed that 40 percent of the nation's 115 million single-family homes were adjacent to wilderness. That finding was based on 2008 data; CoreLogic is updating the report.
Wilderness communities are never too far from big Western cities because people want to live amid rustic beauty while retaining urban conveniences, said Tom Jeffrey, a CoreLogic researcher.
Large, populated suburbs of big cities are also vulnerable - as the Southern California brush fires demonstrate. Fueled by hot, dry winds, fires this month have forced thousands of people in San Diego County and greater Los Angeles to flee their homes. Gov. Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency.
Jeffrey said even small fires can be exceedingly expensive to put out if homes are nearby.
For instance, officials used 20 fire engines, eight Black Hawk helicopters and two airplanes to put out a two-acre fire in Calabasas, Calif., in January at a cost of more than $100,000, Jeffrey said.
"There's an increased effort to hit them early and hit them hard," he said. "If they have a very strong, early response, they can hopefully contain it."
The cost to taxpayers is smaller in remote, uninhabited areas out West, experts say. That's because authorities are likely to let wildfires run their course in the absence of human settlements, but that's not an option when homes are threatened, said Thomas Scott, a natural resources specialist at the University of California's Berkeley and Riverside campuses.
"The reality is that if you are trying to rescue people's lives or trying to save people's houses you end up spending an awful amount of money," he said.
The number of wilderness communities rose during the 1987 and 1997 housing booms, Scott said. The trend cooled during the recent recession but appears to be heating up again as the U.S. economy improves, Scott said.
He urged local officials to do a better job of directing growth adjacent to wild areas. But local authorities typically give in to powerful real-estate developers and are too afraid of constituents who chafe at elected officials telling them where they can and cannot live, Scott said.
Consequently, in a crowded state like California, entire "stealth cities" have sprung up in the mountains – and thousands of people risk losing their homes when wildfires strike, he said.
Homes in wilderness communities sometimes "can't be saved in a large conflagration," Scott said. "The question then becomes, can you expect society to underwrite your desire to live in a chaparral?"
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