LOS ANGELES — Crews continue to battle high winds as they work to extinguish a wildfire in Oakland that broke out Friday afternoon, burning two homes and forcing 500 evacuations before it could be brought under control.
The firefight will continue throughout the evening and into at least Sunday morning, Fire Chief Damon Covington said in an update Saturday afternoon. It took more than a hundred firefighters to stop the progress of the flames.
Around 1:30 p.m. Friday, calls came in reporting a fire outside a home in the Oakland Hills. When crews arrived, the inferno was growing rapidly, with wind speeds ranging from a calm breeze to gusts of 40 miles per hour during red flag conditions.
The fire burned two homes and damaged several others, while hundreds were forced to evacuate. It also closed the westbound lanes of Interstate 580, but traffic was moving again Friday evening. While some evacuation orders have been lifted, many residents won’t be able to return to their homes until the fire is “stabilized and really under control,” Covington said.
Firefighters are also removing eucalyptus trees that could pose a hazard to homes because the tree’s bark and oils make it susceptible to fire.
Authorities have issued red flag warnings of fire danger through Saturday across much of the state, from the Central Coast through the Bay Area to northern Shasta County, not far from the Oregon border.
“The wind is tough, but we’ve been battling the wind since we’ve been here,” Covington said. “They are incremental, they come and they go. But when they come, they are tough, so we want to make sure we don’t allow any new momentum.”
A California utility shut off power in 19 counties in the northern and central part of the state as a major “ diablo wind ” – infamous in the fall for hot, dry wind gusts – increases the risk of wildfires.
The cause of the fire was not immediately known.
The Oakland Hills fire raged a day before the 19th birthday of a 1991 fire which destroyed almost 3,000 homes and killed 25 people.
During a diablo wind, the air is so dry that the relative humidity drops, causing vegetation to dry out and be ready to burn. The name – “diablo” is Spanish for “devil” – is informally applied to a hot wind that blows from inland toward the coast near the San Francisco region as high pressure builds over the west. The high winds are expected to continue for part of the weekend.