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Fierce winds fanning Californian wildfires are expected to abate on Monday and give firefighters a chance to corral blazes that have scorched swaths of wine country in the north and neighborhoods near Los Angeles in the south.
However, forecasters with the National Weather Service (NWS) said high winds would return later in the week and could be the strongest so far this year in the south of the state.
Residents of some of the most expensive neighborhoods in Los Angeles were ordered to evacuate early on Monday morning after a brush fire broke out near the Getty Center museum.
The Los Angeles Fire Department said in an advisory that it was a “very dynamic fire” that had already consumed more than 70 acres.
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Basketball star LeBron James, who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, said he had been driving around with his family looking for shelter after being forced to flee.
“Finally found a place to accommodate us!” he wrote on Twitter. “Crazy night man!”
Officials at the Getty said the fire was burning to the north of the museum, which was designed with thick stone walls to prevent fire from damaging its treasures.
Marc Chenard, a forecaster with the NWS’s Weather Prediction Center, said wind gusts in northern California would abate by midday and in the south of the state by later in the afternoon.
“But late Tuesday through Thursday, the winds are back and in some areas can be more extreme than before,” he said. “We have the potential for the strongest Santa Ana (southern) winds of the year.”
Wind gusts can be between 50 to 60 miles per hour (80-96 kph), with some significantly higher, he said. “It’s going to be bad.”
The northern California wine country has borne the brunt of the fires, with 84 square miles (218 sq km) burned and 190,000 people evacuated in the so-called Kincade fire.
Only about 5 per cent of that fire was contained early on Monday after crews lost ground against the wind-driven wildfire a day earlier.
About 3,000 people were battling the Kincade Fire, the worst of more than a dozen major blazes that have damaged or destroyed nearly 400 structures and prompted Governor Gavin Newsom to declare a statewide emergency.
“All hands are focusing on the Kincade,” Mr Newsom told reporters after meeting residents at an evacuation center in the Sonoma County city of Petaluma, calling the blaze “the most stubborn challenge we face.”
Investigators have not yet said what they believed caused the blaze, although it ignited near a broken wire on a Pacific Gas & Electric transmission tower.
High wind forecasts prompted PG&E to shut off power to 940,000 customers in 43 counties on Saturday night to guard against the risk of touching off wildfires.
The governor has been sharply critical of PG&E, saying corporate greed and mismanagement kept it from upgrading its infrastructure while wildfire hazards have steadily worsened over the past decade.
PG&E filed for bankruptcy in January citing billions of dollars in civil liabilities from deadly wildfires sparked by its equipment in 2017 and 2018. – Reuters