All the ingredients were there for a massive wildfire.
The mercurial Santa Ana winds gusted up to 85 mph before dawn Friday in San Diego County’s backcountry. The relative humidity fell below 10%. And the landscape was critically dry.
But for the moment at least, the county has escaped the sort of catastrophic wildfires that continue to roar across parts of Los Angeles County, destroying some homes in a matter of minutes.
“I was relieved when I woke up this morning and saw there were no fires here,” said Alex Tardy, a forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Rancho Bernardo. “Everything was in play for something bad to happen. All it would have taken was a spark.”
The threat hasn’t passed.
Forecasters say that a weaker round of Santa Ana winds will blow through the county on Saturday night and early Sunday, and the winds will remain offshore well into next week.
“We’re not going to be out of the woods until we get some rain,” Tardy said. “It doesn’t have to be a deluge. Just something to cause the vegetation to turn green. And we need to get past these offshore winds.”
San Diego has only received 0.16 inches of precipitation since July 1. And there’s no significant rain in the 10-day forecast.
Although fire didn’t scorch the county overnight, the very threat of it is still causing a lot of hardship. At 8 a.m., more than 8,200 customers were without electricity as SDG&E de-energized some circuits in backcountry and mountainous communities such as Alpine, Julian, Jacumba and the Viejas Reservation.
Utilities in California often employ what are called public safety power shutoffs in order to reduce the risk of high winds causing power lines to fall to dry ground, potentially igniting a wildfire.
“Power will remain out as long as high winds pose a safety threat to communities,” SDG&E said in a statement. Emergency crews will inspect power lines and other equipment and infrastructure when gusts die down, the utility said, and then start restoring power to affected areas.
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