Snow, rain help control California wildfires

Declaring victory over firestorms that ravaged many Southern California mountain communities for the last 10 days, officials were sending weary firefighters home yesterday, saying the blazes were all but extinguished.

The talk among firefighting and emergency management agencies turned from battling the wildfires that charred almost 750,000 acres and destroyed nearly 3,400 homes to helping the victims with financial aid to rebuild and restart their shattered lives.

Firefighters shared the credit for putting an end to the devastating fires with Mother Nature, who drenched the flames on Saturday with heavy rains, snow and near freezing temperatures - conditions that were due to continue for the next few days.

"This is the day we didn't believe we would ever see," said Andrea Tuttle, director of the California Department of Forestry. "We don't have any more hot flames anywhere."

Looking back on the disaster, Tuttle said, "The real story is the hundreds of thousands of structures saved."

She added there were still some smoldering spots, such as burning logs and soil, but fire crews were cleaning those up.

Outgoing California Governor Gray Davis, who met fire evacuees at a disaster relief centre in Claremont, east of Los Angeles, with Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, said he had asked that the federal government shoulder more than the usual 75 per cent cost of disaster emergency relief funds.

California, strapped with a potential $10 billion budget gap for 2004, can ill afford the fire bill, which has been estimated by various state officials at between $2 billion and $12 billion.

Mr Davis said more than 5,000 residents had applied for government aid and Ridge said checks for fire victims should be in the mail next week.

Mike McGroarty, deputy chief of fire operation for California's Office of Emergency Services, said the fires, which killed 20 people and forced tens of thousands to evacuate, had "pretty much slowed and in some cases have stopped."

Mr McGroarty said the fire crews would begin to go home depending on how far they were from their home base, with Nevada and Northern California teams heading out first.

More of the 100,000-plus residents who fled their homes over the past week were allowed to go back to their communities charred by the 10 major fires to see if their homes were among the more than 3,334 destroyed.

One area where residents will not be allowed back for a while, however, is Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains north-east of Los Angeles.

The rains that hit the area on Saturday also brought rockslides, blocking state Highway 18, the only road into the popular tourist resort.

Tuttle said the town was without power. "It's dark and cold up here," she said by telephone from the Lake Arrowhead Fire Department, which has its own emergency generators.