The next 48 hours are now crucial for those fighting California’s wildfires.
Ferocious, hot, Santa Ana winds are due to return and, this time, firefighters want to get ahead of it.
At West Ridge Trailhead, where fire crews from Orange County are hard at work damping down already burnt ground, Brian Stewart of the Orange County Fire Department says so far they have found “several little hotspots [where] we are basically trying to turn dirt into mud to make sure it can’t reignite.”
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The fear is the embers buried below the surface could come to life in the right conditions.
Overhead, fire retardant gushes down from a helicopter – the aim is to create a sodden fire break.
Many of those here have been fighting the flames now for almost a week.
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Brent Waterworth from Fountain Valley fire department arrived on Tuesday.
He and his team had battled the blaze for 72 hours and the footage they share with us is terrifying.
“That was a little intense,” he says, “but the conditions were intense, there was a lot of wind, there was a lot of fire, a lot of heat and there wasn’t enough resources to manage it so we weren’t going to leave.”
There have been political recriminations about the emergency services, access to water at the height of the blazes, but Brent is philosophical.
“Water wasn’t the problem for us in a lot of places.”
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He added: “It was just being overrun by such huge winds with so much fire and so much heat. There was definitely times where we could’ve used more water but, really, more resource means more equipment. I don’t know [if] it would have really helped.”
These crews know they could well face similar scenes in the coming hours.
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They can only hope the work that they are doing now will prevent a repeat of the horror of last week on the suburban streets of Los Angeles.
