Santa Ana winds ramp back up, returning extreme fire risk to Southern California

AccuWeather

Gusty winds have returned to Southern California as wildfires continue burning.

Transcript

00:00Well, Southern California saw a break from the gusty winds. The last few days,

00:04firefighters were able to gain better control of the wildfires, but windy

00:08conditions are ramping back up, and that means an increase in fire risk once

00:12again. To help us break down the details were joined now by AccuWeather

00:15California expert Ken Clark. Good evening, Ken. Good evening. Let's talk

00:20first quickly about winds have ramped back up and we've already seen one fire

00:25breakouts at Griffith Park that firefighters were able to get under

00:28control pretty quickly. Yeah, they were able to control that very quickly, and

00:31luckily there were no winds in the Griffith Park area at the time, so they

00:35were able to extinguish that fire, and it was arson related. They did catch the

00:39individual that started the fire. And we do still have, of course, the Palisades

00:44and Eaton fires burning, but thankfully the last couple of days firefighters

00:47have been able to make some significant progress. They really have, and that's good

00:51news. The problem is now we have to contain the containment because we have

00:57the risk of the strong winds blowing over these same areas that it would pick

01:02up maybe some more embers again and start spreading the fire. That's

01:05something that the firefighters are very cognizant about and are guarding against.

01:09We have about another little less than 24 hours of very strong winds coming up

01:16for this entire area, the Santa Ana region, which is Ventura County, parts of

01:21LA County, Inland Empire, all the way down to parts of San Diego. We're seeing winds

01:25right now 35 to 55 miles per hour on average. I've seen some gusts over 70

01:30miles per hour. We haven't reached the peak yet. That will not occur until late

01:34this afternoon and early tonight Pacific Time, and that's when the combination of

01:40the strongest offshore flow is and also the strongest winds aloft. So we still

01:44have the worst yet to come in the way of winds, and we just got to watch, make

01:49sure we don't have any sparks out there to cause another fire.

01:53And Ken, remind people, you know, when we have these extreme Santa Ana winds, it

01:57leads to extreme fire danger. Lay out for people why that is.

02:02Well, we have the very dry conditions and the humidity levels of dropping

02:06again. We're going to see single digit relative humidities. We haven't had a

02:10rain of consequences last spring in all the L. A. Area and all of Southern

02:14California, and the winds just exasperate the very dry conditions. If

02:20a spark does occur, it doesn't take very long at all. As we saw two weeks

02:24ago with what happened in Palisades and also the Eaton fire that they can get

02:29out of control really quickly. So these kind of situations just you have to be

02:33on really on edge and and watching things very closely to make sure we

02:38don't have anything like that happen again. Mm hmm. And Ken, we're just

02:42seeing Santa Ana event after Santa Ana event. Unfortunately, once the current

02:46winds die down, the next kind of gusty winds are not far behind it. They will

02:52be that we expect the winds to die down tomorrow afternoon, tomorrow night into

02:55Wednesday, not go away totally, but died down quite a bit and become more

02:59localized. They probably ramped back up a little bit again Wednesday night and

03:03Thursday, not to the degree we have right now, but they will come up some.

03:07And then after that, we see a big break coming again starting Friday as a low

03:11turns onshore humidity returns, cooler temperatures start to come back in. And

03:16this weekend, I think there is likelihood of rate. We don't know quite

03:20how much yet probably would be more showers could be a thunderstorm to and

03:24low snow levels by Sunday, Monday, probably down around 4000 ft. So big

03:29changes coming up. We have very dry and warming conditions over the next couple

03:32of days and we had some wind and now this weekend we're gonna turn things

03:37around and bring a much cooler temperatures and some needed

03:40precipitation. Yeah, we will take any changes that we can get. Ken, thank you

03:45so much for the update. Accuweather California expert Ken Clark.

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