Progress made in difficult fight against wildfires

The president promised
Californians that things will be better tomorrow.

RUNNING SPRINGS, Calif. (AP) — Along the Rim of the World Highway, Jennifer Smith watched air tanker after air tanker duck through brown clouds of smoke, choking off the flames attacking the San Bernardino Mountains by dropping fluorescent pink plumes of retardant.

“Kill it, squash it,” the U.S. Forest Service employee and longtime resident muttered. Her black mutt watched from the passenger side of her truck.

“Yeah!” Smith shouted when a load of retardant hit the treetops.

Thursday was a great day for air tankers in the mountains, where more than 300 homes have been lost since wildfires erupted there on Monday. With temperatures falling and powerful winds finally subsided, firefighters made progress throughout Southern California against blazes that consumed about 750 square miles and at least 1,800 homes in less than five days.

There was bad news to go with the good. The burned bodies of a married couple were found, raising the number of people killed directly by the flames to three. Another four burned bodies were found at an apparent camp for illegal immigrants Thursday afternoon, but it was not immediately clear when they died.

In San Diego County, by far the hardest hit of the seven counties where fires raged, several blazes remained far from containment as the amount of land burned approached half a million acres.

Mandatory evacuation orders, however, were lifted for most residential areas of San Diego. Shelters emptied at a rapid rate, and residents in some neighborhoods returned to their streets, many lined with the wreckage of melted cars.

President Bush surveyed the damage in the hard-hit San Diego County community of Rancho Bernardo, where he draped his arm around a woman who had lost her home.

“We want the people to know there’s a better day ahead — that today your life may look dismal, but tomorrow life’s going to be better,” Bush said. Earlier he declared seven counties a major disaster area, making residents eligible for federal assistance to help them rebuild.

His visit came just hours after rescue crews found two burned bodies in the rubble that had been a home in Escondido. The couple had been urged to evacuate.

Neighbors told authorities they last saw the two around midnight Monday. They were reported missing sometime after that.

San Diego County deputies had taken a cursory look Wednesday around the latest victims’ home and found no one inside. When they did not turn up during the day, a search-and-rescue team was sent to the site and found one body Wednesday night and a second set of remains early Thursday.

They were identified as John Christopher Bain, 58, a mortgage broker, and his wife, Victoria Fox, 55, a teacher. A relative who did not want to be identified because she was too distraught to talk to other reporters confirmed the deaths to The Associated Press; the names matched property records for the address where the bodies were found.

The four bodies were found by Border Patrol agents on routine patrol in a wooded area near Barrett Junction, just east of San Diego and along the Mexican border, agency spokeswoman Gloria Chavez said. The area is near a major corridor for illegal immigrants who often walk hours or even days to cross into the United States from Mexico.

Authorities said they discovered the bodies Thursday afternoon but did not know when the victims died.

“They could have been out there a while,” said Paul Parker, a spokesman for the San Diego County medical examiner’s office. They were tentatively identified as three men and one woman.

The area was burned by a fire straddling the Mexican border that days earlier claimed the life of 52-year-old Tecate man who refused to leave his house.

Officials have reported 10 deaths connected to the fires; seven died of causes other than flames. At least 40 firefighters and 35 other people have been injured.

In the Los Angeles area, fire crews worked to tamp out many wildfires, including two that burned 21 homes and are now fully contained. But the focus shifted to flames still raging in Orange and San Diego counties, particularly in rural areas near the Mexico border where more evacuation orders were issued.

The total burn area across California was more than 482,000 acres — about 753 square miles. Eight Indian reservations have been damaged, with evacuation centers set up for tribal members.

In the San Bernardinos east of Los Angeles, fire officials said 16,000 homes remained in the path of two wildfires that remained out of control, but were being bombarded by aerial tankers and helicopters.

San Diego officials said the number of homes destroyed had risen to at least 1,470, about 400 more than previously reported. That brings the number of homes destroyed in the seven affected counties to at least 1,800.

A 23,000-acre blaze in Orange County has been declared arson. Five people in San Diego, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties have been arrested on suspicion of arson, but none has been linked to any of the major blazes, authorities said Thursday.

A sixth man, Russell Lane Daves, 27, of Topock, Ariz., was shot to death by San Bernardino police Tuesday after he fled officers who approached to see if he might be trying to set a fire.

The Santa Ana winds that had fueled the flames were all but gone by Thursday, but San Diego County remained a tinderbox. Firefighters cut fire lines around sections of the major blazes, but none of the four fires was more than 40 percent contained. More than 8,500 homes were still threatened.

Towns scattered throughout the county remained on the edge of disaster, including the apple-picking region around Julian, where dozens of homes burned in 2003. Authorities also evacuated Jamul, an upscale community of about 6,000 in a hilly region about 20 miles east of San Diego.

David and Brandy Hradecky, who defied evacuation orders with their daughters, said a small percentage of residents stayed in Jamul and worked with firefighters to save their neighbors’ homes.

David Hradecky said he spent 21⁄2 days using his bulldozer to create firebreaks around seven homes and said his young daughters even used 5-gallon buckets to put out hotspots and quench the thirst of farm animals that had been left behind.

“Where are you going to go? They were evacuating the evacuee places. We know what to do. We took care of all the people’s houses,” said Brandy Hradecky.