October 26, 2007	Friday	Shawwal 13, 1428

LOS ANGELES, Oct 25: Easing winds offered Californian firefighters some respite on Thursday as they battled to contain blazes that have killed at least five people and caused more than a billion dollars in property damage.

Some 1,700 buildings have been destroyed in the 18 wildfires that have erupted since Sunday, forcing about half a million people to flee their homes and scorching 172,000 hectares (426,000 acres) of tinder-dry countryside stretching from celebrity-studded Malibu to beyond the Mexican border.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said three people were killed and 40 injured in the fires, the worst to hit California since devastating 2003 blazes which claimed 22 lives.

Police in San Bernardino shot and killed a suspected arsonist after chasing him out of dry scrub, and Hesperia police arrested a man on suspicion of arson, the Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday.

The fast-spreading infernos were fuelled by powerful desert winds gusting across the region towards the ocean. The winds began to die down on Wednesday, and increased coastal humidity early on Thursday enabled firefighters to make great strides in containing three of the five biggest blazes.

So far 1,664 structures, including 1,436 homes, have been destroyed while a further 25,000 buildings remained threatened, Schwarzenegger said.

“The wind stopped blowing and that made our lives a lot easier,” said a Los Angeles County Fire Department official tackling the Buckweed fire, which charred 15,000 hectares before it was contained late Wednesday.

The two biggest California fires, covering around 108,000 hectares of San Diego County, were both only 10 per cent contained.

President George W. Bush, scheduled to tour the fire-ravaged area on Thursday, formally declared California a disaster zone on Wednesday. The measure expands on his announcement of federal aid on Tuesday, and paves the way for more federal funds to boost the relief effort.

“Most importantly, I want the people in southern California to know that Americans all across this land care deeply about them,” Bush said.

The fierce, dry and hot Santa Ana winds that blew in from the desert were now replaced by mild, cooler wind blowing in from the Pacific, meteorologists said.

Some 8,900 firefighters — including 2,600 prison inmates trained to tackle fires — are battling the flames supported by 90 firefighting aircraft, including a DC-10, 25 air tankers and 40 helicopters.

Schwarzenegger, who described the destruction as “terrible and tragic,” paid tribute to the weary firefighters.

“They are really extraordinary, they are working 24 hours a day, around-the-clock. In fact many of them have been working 36 or 48 hours without stopping,” he said.

Lesley Kirk, a spokeswoman for San Diego County, said that the total cost of fire damage had exceeded one billion dollars and was expected to go higher.

San Diego has emerged as the ground zero of the crisis, where the bulk of hundreds of thousands of evacuations have taken place.

Some 318,000 households had been ordered to evacuate in San Diego, where officials have put the numbers of displaced people at 500,000.

A spokeswoman from the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services said officials expected the numbers of displaced people to be “significantly higher” than 500,000 but would not give an estimate.

By late Wednesday, 5,000 evacuees remained in San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium, down from 12,000 who had spent the night at the site on Tuesday.

Some evacuees were allowed to return to their destroyed homes in order to retrieve possessions. In the San Diego suburb of Rancho Bernardo, where more than 600 homes were destroyed, Mark Davis returned to find a charred ruin.

“We kind of thought when we left it did not have much of a chance,” said Davis, who fled his home of 28 years on Monday after awaking to smoke and flames outside.

The causes of the different fires raging throughout the state vary, with a fallen power line believed to be the cause of a blaze in Malibu.

Orange County officials are convinced that the giant Santiago Canyon fire, which broke out at three points on Sunday, was deliberately set. They have posted a 70,000 dollar reward to capture the alleged arsonist and have asked the FBI to help, local news media reported.—AFP