SAN DIEGO (KGTV) – San Diego County is in the middle of heat and high wind advisories, which are posing a greater fire risk for our region.
“We're currently experiencing a Santa Ana wind event,” Captain Josh Cormode from Cal Fire San Diego said. “We've gone ahead and prepared, upstaffing additional equipment. That equipment will be strategically placed in the county.”
We’ve gone from hot and humid to rainy back to hot weather again. This time with those Santa Ana winds coming through the region.
“And the heat advisory today we have through the weekend,” Deputy Chief Willy Melendez from the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department said.
Cal Fire San Diego told ABC 10News despite getting that much-needed rain this past weekend, San Diego’s right back into that critical fire danger with the high wind warning for our inland and mountain areas.
“Whatever moisture that vegetation soaked up, we've now had Santa Ana's pushing through for a little over 24 hours. So that fuel is right back to where it started, extremely dry. It's ready to burn,” Cormode said. “And with those types of winds, if anything is to start, that's where we start to see the extreme fire behavior and potential for major incidents.”
Something that San Diego Fire-Rescue said we saw with the Henderson Fire near Camp Pendleton, which continued to burn and grow on Friday.
“We are upstaffing several divisions within our department that include the lifeguard division on the beaches; we anticipate higher crowds,” Melendez said.
The department said it’s staffing a second helicopter to knock down fires before they spread in San Diego’s coastal areas, which are in the middle of a heat advisory.
“In the city we have a lot of wildland urban interface areas. We have a lot of canyons with homes right up on the canyons,” Melendez said. “We saw that with the Sorrento Fires earlier this summer with the potential for spread.”
Both agencies are reminding people to be vigilant and prepared with these wildfire conditions.
“Part of our El Niño working group that we've been working with, there's a lot of internal coordination to make sure that we can get ahead of this. So anytime we can prepare, in a collaborative manner within the city and the county. It's actually preparing us even better for a larger incident,” Melendez said.
