California fire begins to relent, authorities say; governor, Trump again feud over state prevention efforts

FILE - In this Nov. 1, 2019 file photo flames from a backfire consume a hillside as firefighters battle the Maria Fire in Santa Paula, Calif. According to the Ventura County Fire Department, the blaze has scorched more than 8,000 acres and destroyed at least two structures. (AP Photo/Noah Berger,File)
FILE - In this Nov. 1, 2019 file photo flames from a backfire consume a hillside as firefighters battle the Maria Fire in Santa Paula, Calif. According to the Ventura County Fire Department, the blaze has scorched more than 8,000 acres and destroyed at least two structures. (AP Photo/Noah Berger,File)

LOS ANGELES -- Authorities lifted all evacuation orders as firefighters made progress Sunday on a large blaze that sent thousands of people fleeing homes and farms northwest of Los Angeles.

Crews working in steep terrain were tamping down hot spots and paying attention to lingering gusts that could carry embers in mountain areas, said Ventura County Fire Capt. Steve Kaufmann.

"I'd say we're cautiously optimistic," Kaufmann said, citing calmer winds and rising humidity levels.

Firefighters have contained 50% of the blaze, which has burned nearly 15 square miles of dry brush and timber. Three buildings were destroyed.

More than 11,000 people evacuated after the flames spread Thursday amid dry winds that have fanned fires across the state this fall.

In his first comments on the recent California fires, President Donald Trump threatened to cut U.S. funding to the state.

Trump tweeted that California Gov. Gavin Newsom has done a "terrible job of forest management." When fires rage, the governor turns to the federal government for help, Trump said.

"No more," the president tweeted.

[Video not showing up above? Click here to view » www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP4WPFDancg]

Newsom replied with a tweet of his own: "You don't believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation."

California has increased fire prevention investments and fuel management projects in recent years while federal funding has shrunk, the governor's office said in a statement.

"We're successfully waging war against thousands of fires started across the state in the last few weeks due to extreme weather created by climate change while Trump is conducting a full on assault against the antidotes," Newsom said.

The state controls just 3% of forest land in California, while the federal government owns 57%, according to numbers provided by Newsom's office. About 40% of the state's forest land is privately owned. Neither of the two major fires currently burning are on state forest land.

Last year, Trump made a similar threat as wildfires devastated the California cities of Malibu and Paradise -- accusing the state of "gross mismanagement" of forests.

At the time, Newsom defended California's wildfire prevention efforts while criticizing the federal government for not doing enough to help protect the state.

California has made fuel management a priority after the 2018 wildfire season, Jesse Melgar, a spokesman for Newsom, told The Washington Post. At the same time, Melgar said, the federal government "slashed funding" for some of those fire prevention activities.

As crews work to contain fires across the state, more people in Northern California have returned to areas evacuated from a huge fire that burned for days in the Sonoma County wine country.

The 121-square-mile fire was 76% contained on Sunday, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.

The tally of destroyed homes reached 175, and another 35 were damaged, authorities said. Many other structures also burned.

Investigators are looking into the causes of the two major fires that are currently burning, including the possibility that electrical lines might have been involved -- as was the case at other recent fires.

Southern California Edison said Friday that it re-energized a 16,000-volt power line 13 minutes before the fire ignited in the same area of Ventura County.

Edison and other utilities around the state shut off power to hundreds of thousands of people last week because of concerns that high winds could cause power lines to spark and start fires.

Edison will cooperate with investigators, the utility said.

Authorities have arrested a man on suspicion of setting a series of small brush fires Saturday in Garin Regional Park in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Park officials said responding firefighters spotted a suspicious person nearby. A short time later, police arrested 42-year-old Roman Montalvo. The fires collectively burned fewer than 10 acres, and no injuries were reported.

RADAR SYSTEM

While tens of thousands of Californians have had to flee the fires, a handful of researchers have driven toward them. Scientists with San Jose State University's Fire Weather Research Laboratory have been deploying to the blazes, taking advantage of the dire fire conditions to test an experimental Doppler radar capable of peering into wildfire smoke plumes at unprecedented resolution.

Researchers hope the system will yield new insights into the inner structure and evolution of the most dangerous blazes. This could lead to better tools for tracking and forecasting fires, thereby reducing damage and casualties.

"This system is unique," said Craig Clements, the director of the Fire Weather Research Laboratory who's led deployments of the new radar over the past few weeks.

Doppler radars emit pulses of microwave energy into the air that bounce off particles, whether that's raindrops, snow, insects or ash. The reflections the radar picks up provide information on the size and motion of those particles, which help scientists paint a picture of the weather event. Fire researchers have used mobile Doppler radar rigs to study wildfires before, and they've also taken advantage of fixed radar stations operated by the National Weather Service to track large blazes.

But they've never had an instrument quite so well-suited to peering inside the plume of an active fire and capturing its evolution in real time. While weather radars typically use a set of frequencies with wavelengths of about 4 inches -- called S-band frequencies -- San Jose State University's new radar relies on the Ka-band frequencies, a set of millimeter-wavelength frequencies that are better able to detect the fine, ashy particles present in wildfire plumes.

The radar also scans faster and at a higher resolution than most radar systems, meaning it can produce more detailed smoke plume snapshots more often.

And because the radar is mounted on a truck, the scientists working with the Fire Weather Research Laboratory can deploy it to an active fire and start collecting information within minutes of arriving on the scene.

"It's night and day," says Neil Lareau, a fire weather researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno who helped put together a proposal for the radar system while he was a professor at San Jose State University. To visualize how much of a leap in resolution the new tool represents, Lareau made the analogy to images of Pluto captured before and after NASA's 2015 New Horizons flyby mission.

Originally, the university's scientists were going to deploy the radar for the first time to study a large, controlled burn that the U.S. Forest Service had planned to set in southern Utah at the end of October or early this month.

But when fires started breaking out across California in early October, Clements and his team mobilized. So far, they've sent their radar out to the field three times: Once to look at the Briceburg Fire that flared up near Yosemite National Park in early October, and twice to study the Kincade Fire that roared to life in Northern California's Sonoma County on Oct. 23.

In an overnight survey of the Kincade Fire, Clements said, the team captured some "amazing details" with the new radar, including information on the wind field and turbulence within the plume. The strong winds that large wildfires produce not only help them spread, but can spin up dramatic fire whirls. Currently, weather models are unable to forecast them, and they can cause fires to behave erratically, overtaking fire crews.

The system also captured a great deal of information on the size and shape of plume particles, including what the researchers believe to be embers that were buoyed aloft via updrafts. A key way that some large wildfires grow is by hurling hot embers hundreds or even thousands of feet ahead of the fire front. But scientists' ability to track this process, called "ember casting," has been very limited.

"The radar has the potential to see where these embers are going up and where they're coming down," Lareau said. "This has the potential to map things out in real time."

Ultimately, Clements and his colleagues hope the data they're collecting will help front-line responders tackle the large, intense, and hard-to-predict wildfires that are becoming more frequent out West as landscapes warm up and dry out.

New insights into processes like ember casting and the formation of fire-induced winds could be fed into wildfire models, improving their ability to predict where a fire will jump next. With further refinement, similar radars might be made available to fire management teams one day, providing them with detailed real-time reconnaissance information as they're fighting a blaze.

"In the same way you can see where a thunderstorm will be in an hour, we might [one day] be able to do that for fires," Lareau said.

Information for this article was contributed by Christopher Weber and staff members of The Associated Press; and by Kim Bellware, Andrew Freedman and Maddie Stone of The Washington Post.

A Section on 11/04/2019

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