Evacuations were ordered in the middle of the night in San Bernardino.
Multiple homes were burning in the San Bernardino area after a brush fire ignited Thursday morning and quickly grew to engulf 200 acres in the latest eruption of wildfire in California.
Firefighters got the call about a brush fire near Highway 18 shortly after 1 a.m. local time, said Chris Prater, a spokesman for the San Bernardino Fire Department. Strong winds have pushed the blaze into northern San Bernardino, and hundreds of homes west of the highway have been evacuated.
“It’s very fast-moving,” Mr. Prager said of the blaze, known as the Hillside fire. “We do have very strong winds coming out of the north-northeast, facilitating the fire spread.”
The dry conditions and low humidity were making the fire more difficult to fight, he added. “We’ve had these winds for the past few weeks, and it’s dried out the fields.”
Another fire in Jurupa Valley, just southwest of San Bernardino, grew to cover 75 acres on Thursday morning, damaged at least two residential structures and prompted evacuations, according to the Riverside County Fire Department.
Firefighters battling the Kincade fire are optimistic
Firefighters in Northern California believe they have “turned the corner” in battling the Kincade fire and are expecting more good news on Thursday and in coming days.
At a Wednesday night news conference, the authorities listed several positive signs: The fire was 45 percent contained, up from 30 percent on Wednesday morning. Air quality was improving. Strong, gusty winds had subsided. And most of the roughly 190,000 residents who were evacuated had been cleared to return to their homes.
“We believe that most of the threat is now in our rearview mirror, and we are moving forward here,” said Mark Essick, the Sonoma County sheriff.
The fire burned 76,825 acres, destroyed 266 structures and damaged 47 others as of Wednesday night. More than 4,200 firefighting personnel were still on the scene, some of whom worked through the night. The authorities cautioned that despite the good news, the fire could still behave unpredictably, as humidity remained low and there was no rain in the forecast.
But Jonathan Cox, a division chief with Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, said firefighters were also shifting their focus away from the front lines and toward “secondary hazards,” including pockets of embers and trees in danger of falling.
In Southern California, a different picture emerged. A fast-moving brush fire that began early Wednesday — and burned its way 100 yards from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum — was still raging.
As of Wednesday night, that fire, known as the Easy fire, was 5 percent contained and threatened 7,000 structures.
A new state web portal includes links to updates on fire status, evacuation zones, power outages, shelters and housing, road conditions and other information related to the fires, compiled by state agencies like Cal Fire and Caltrans and by utility companies.
Some Sonoma County residents returned home.
On Wednesday, officials at Cal Fire lifted some mandatory evacuation orders around the Kincade fire, allowing thousands of people to return to their homes.
Two of those places were the communities of Windsor and Healdsburg, with a combined population of about 40,000 people, where evacuation orders were downgraded from mandatory to voluntary.
Maricela Garcia, 29, was among those who rushed back home. She is 35 weeks pregnant and had fled on Saturday with her 5-year-old son, her husband, a few changes of clothes and a pillow.
They had stayed in three places since. Her son, Nathaniel, has not had school all week. Her husband, Francisco, 34, has missed a week of wages at his construction job. On Tuesday, she started feeling extremely fatigued, and almost had Francisco take her to the hospital.
She is ready for things to get back to normal, she said outside her house on a tree-lined block. “I’m just glad we have a home to come back to,” she said. They still have no power, and the refrigerator is full of food gone bad. But she said she could not be mad at officials for evacuating them. “They were just trying to keep everybody safe.”
Elsewhere in Windsor late Wednesday, the traffic lights were still out, but people were beginning to stream back in, their pickup trucks and sedans loaded with suitcases and pets. On one corner, a cluster of people stood on the road with a large banner that read “Welcome home Windsor residents.” They jumped up and down and flashed thumbs-up signs as their neighbors honked their horns.
Maps show where the fires are burning now.
We’re continuing to update our page of maps showing the extent of the fires, power outages and evacuation zones.
Reporting was contributed by Julie Turkewitz in Windsor, Calif., Tim Arango in Simi Valley, Calif., and Mihir Zaveri and Jacey Fortin in New York.
