The sun was beginning to set on Halloween when a small fire began to glow on a hillside near Santa Paula.
coming from Nevada and Utah toward the Pacific Ocean. Typically, October sees about six days of Santa Ana wind conditions, while November sees nine and December and January have 10 and 11, respectively. Diablo winds occur most frequently in October.“The fire danger hasn’t diminished at all. In some ways, this is really the start of the beginning,” Patzert said. “Everything is pointing to more large fires here unless we get some rain.
Last month’s severe winds also ushered in extremely dry air, leaving much of the state’s vegetation at near-critical dry levels. Several regions — including the southern Sierra Nevada, the San Francisco Bay Area, the Sacramento Valley and a sizable swath of the Southern California coast — have reached severely dry levels. Those parched fuels can help turn a spark into a raging inferno.
“Californians think we are out of a drought, and we are, water-storage wise,” said Mike Mohler, deputy director of the California Fire and Forestry Protection Department, or Cal Fire. “But after years of persistent dry conditions, those dead fuels are still scattered across the landscape. And it only takes a 12-hour Santa Ana wind event to bring live fuels to critically dry levels.”
Santa Ana and Diablo winds have been part of California’s ecology since prehistoric times, experts say. But the fire risk to populated areas has risen as people have increasingly built homes and moved into wildlands particularly susceptible to wind-whipped fires. In Southern California, more people live in Santa Ana wind corridors like the Santa Clara River Valley in Ventura County, south of the Cajon Pass in the Inland Empire and west of the San Gorgonio Pass east of Riverside, Patzert said.
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