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