VENTURA, Calif. — The same vicious winds that turned three Southern California wildfires into destructive dynamos were also making the firefight more difficult. The water-dropping planes and helicopters essential to taming and containing wildfires have been mostly grounded because it’s too dangerous to fly them in the strong winds. Tuesday saw gusts of over 50 mph.
Commanders hoped to have them back in the air Wednesday morning, but all indications were that the winds would be whipping then too, fanning the flames that spurred evacuation orders for nearly 200,000 people, destroyed nearly 200 homes and remained mostly out control.
“The prospects for containment are not good,” Ventura County Fire Chief Mark Lorenzen said at a news conference Tuesday. “Really, Mother Nature’s going to decide when we have the ability to put it out.”
Southern California’s so-called Santa Ana winds have long contributed to some of the region’s most disastrous wildfires. They blow from the inland toward the Pacific Ocean, speeding up as they squeeze through mountain passes and canyons.
The largest and most destructive of the fires, an 85-square-mile wildfire in Ventura County northwest of Los Angeles, had nearly reached the Pacific on Tuesday night after starting 30 miles inland a day earlier.
The wildfire jumped a major artery, U.S. Highway 101, to a rocky beach northwest of Ventura, bringing new evacuations, though officials said the sparse population and lack of vegetation in the area meant it wasn’t overly dangerous, and the highway wasn’t closed.
Still, caution was urged:
The fire had destroyed at least 150 structures, but incident commander Todd Derum said he suspects hundreds more homes have already been lost, though firefighters have been unable to assess them.
Lisa Kermode and her children returned to their home Tuesday after evacuating Monday to find their home and world in ashes, including a Christmas tree and the presents they had just bought.
“We got knots in our stomach coming back up here,” Kermode said. “We lost everything, everything, all our clothes, anything that was important to us. All our family heirlooms – it’s not sort of gone, it’s completely gone.”
But firefighters in Ventura were able to save a Christmas tree that had years of a family’s ornaments as their mansion burned, reports CBS Los Angeles.
Mansions and modest homes alike were in flames in the city. Dozens of houses in one neighborhood burned to the ground.
John Keasler, 65, and his wife Linda raced out of their apartment building as the flames approached, then stood and watched the fire burn it to the ground.
“It is sad,” Keasler said. “We loved this place. We lost everything.”
Linda Keasler said they were just glad to be alive despite losing so much.
“Those things we can always get back,” she said. “The truth is it is just things and thank god no one died.”
Some 12,000 structures were under threat.
A spokesman for the American Red Cross said they expected a shelter in Ventura County to be at capacity Tuesday night.
Fred Mariscal says Red Cross officials expected about 400 people at the shelter Tuesday night.
He said the shelter was serving meals, providing a mobile shower truck and had doctors and nurses on hand to provide medication for residents who were displaced by the wildfire.
Burned remains of car are seen at Hawaiian Village apartments after wind-driven wildfire swept into Ventura, California on December 5, 2017
MIKE BLAKE / REUTERS
While the blazes brought echoes of the firestorm in Northern California that killed 44 people two months ago, no deaths and only a handful of injuries had been reported.
In the foothills of northern Los Angeles, 30 structures burned. Mayor Eric Garcetti said the gusty winds expected to last most of the week had created a dangerous situation and he urged 150,000 people under mandatory evacuation orders to leave their homes before it’s too late.
“We have lost structures, we have not lost lives,” he said. “Do not wait. Leave your homes.”
Fires aren’t typical in Southern California this time of year but can break out when dry vegetation and too little rain combine with the Santa Ana winds. Hardly any measurable rain has fallen in the region over the past six months.
Fires in suburban settings like these are likely to become more frequent as climate change makes fire season a year-round threat and will put greater pressure on local budgets, said Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College who has written extensively about wildfires.
“There are going to be far greater numbers that are going to be evacuated, as we’re seeing now,” Miller said. “These fires are not just fast and furious, but they’re really expensive to fight.”
In LA County, television shows with large outdoor sets including HBO’s “Westworld” and CBS’s “S.W.A.T.” halted production of because of worries about the safety of cast and crew.
And the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, which hold workouts near the Ventura County fire, canceled practice Wednesday.
© 2017 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.