“This is a major emergency”

My more recent post on the fires is here.

That’s how San Diego County Supervisor Ron Roberts described the situation in southern California with more than 250,000 people being evacuated from their homes fleeing the fires there.

SAN DIEGO – Wildfires fanned by fierce desert winds consumed huge swaths of bone-dry Southern California on Monday, burning dozens of buildings and threatening hundreds more from Malibu to San Diego, including a jail, a hospital and nursing homes.

More than a dozen wildfires had engulfed the region, killing at least one person, injuring dozens more and forcing hundreds of thousands of evacuations. Overwhelmed firefighters said they lacked the resources to save many houses.

“We have more houses burning than we have people and engine companies to fight them,” San Diego Fire Captain Lisa Blake said. “A lot of people are going to lose their homes today.”

Nearly 250,000 people were forced to flee in San Diego County alone, where hundreds of patients were being moved by school bus and ambulance from a hospital and nursing homes, sheriff’s spokeswoman Susan Knauss said.

About a dozen blazes erupted over the weekend, feeding on drought-parched land from the high desert to the Pacific Ocean. One person was killed and several injured in a fire near the Mexican border, and dozens of structures have burned across the region.

Warm temperatures and strong winds created “dramatically worse” conditions overnight as flames shot 200 feet high, said Bill Metcalf, chief of the North County Fire Protection District.

In Orange County, a 1,049-inmate jail was being evacuated because of heavy smoke, sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino said. Inmates were being bused to another facility in Irvine.

All San Diego Police Department officers and off duty detectives were ordered to return to work to help with evacuations.

The fires have burned about 100,000 acres, or 156 square miles, in San Diego County, said county Supervisor Ron Roberts. Across the region, 40,000 acres, or 62 square miles, had burned by Sunday.

According to my sources every resource that can be brought to bear to fight the fires has been called out and it’s still not enough. The Malibu fires are getting the most attention bit there are fires in Los Angeles County, Ventura County, and San Diego. The San Diego fires may end up causing the most damage. The Google interactive map of the fires is here.

LA County has an excellent web site for info on the fires here.