In Southern California, Fourteen Deaths Now Blamed on Wildfires
HEIDI COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: To southern California now. Fourteen deaths are now blamed on wildfires there. At least 10 fires have burned more than a quarter million acres. Fires are raging from Ventura County to San Bernardino County and south to San Diego County. Many San Diego residents were ordered to leave their homes. At least 600 homes have now been destroyed, perhaps many more by this time this morning. Flames are fanned by hot, dry Santa Ana winds, gusting up to 45 miles per hour. The fires have shrouded the Los Angeles metro area in smoke, disrupting air traffic in and out of the city, and consequentially, nationwide. Firefighters struggled into the night to contain the wildfires, which were fanned out of control by those erratic winds. CNN national correspondent Frank Buckley is at the scene of some of the devastation.</s>FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Homes burned to the ground in minutes. Entire streets went up in flames. Intense wind driven fires ravaged hundreds of thousands of acres and destroyed several hundred homes in four southern California counties.</s>CAPT. DENNIS CROSS, LOS ANGELES COUNTY: Southern California is on fire. I mean it's hard to describe it any other way than southern California is on fire.</s>BUCKLEY: Homeowners who, in some cases, had only 15 minutes to evacuate, to decide what was important in their lives to carry away, returned after the fire had passed to find this and this.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: God bless you.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thank you.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Be strong.</s>BUCKLEY: The Stewart family of San Bernardino lost a home and the things most of us regard as priceless.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Our letters and our annuals and pictures when we were babies. And it's not about the value of a washer or a Mustang. It's just about things meaning something because they are part of your life.</s>BUCKLEY: Thousands of southern California residents were evacuated. In San Diego County, fire burned to within a quarter of a mile of an FAA radar facility, causing delays at airports.</s>SHERIFF BILL KOLLENDER, SAN DIEGO COUNTY: Clearly this is one of the types of disasters that is far beyond anybody's realm of imagining. We're not talking about one fire right now, we're talking about four different fires and each one of them has their own unique characteristics and none of them right now are under control.</s>BUCKLEY: As firefighters attempted to protect what they could, the state's outgoing governor, Gray Davis, sought federal declarations of emergency for Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino and San Diego Counties.</s>GOV. GRAY DAVIS (D), CALIFORNIA: These declarations pave the way for federal assistance. And I've written President Bush and asked him to immediately make available financial assistance to help everyone who lost their home or their business in this trouble fire.</s>BUCKLEY (on camera): In San Diego County, where four fires burned, the mayor, Dick Murphy, asked the NFL to either move or postpone the Monday night football game scheduled for San Diego on Monday. The NFL has responded by moving the game to Phoenix, Arizona. So the game between the Miami Dolphins and the San Diego Chargers will be held on Monday night in Arizona. Frank Buckley, CNN, Claremont, California.</s>COLLINS: And we're going to turn things over to Chad Myers now, who has been watching this all morning long, I assume -- and, Chad, you know, obviously people have died, homes have been lost, even Monday night football is being moved.</s>CHAD MYERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right.</s>COLLINS: I know the first question for everyone is where's the relief?</s>MYERS: This afternoon the relief is, Heidi. Yes, good morning. The high pressure kind of dies off a little bit, the low pressure moves away and this very hot air with the down sloping dry winds, the Santa Ana winds, will completely go away this afternoon and to tonight. So we're not going to see those 40 to 50 mile per hour winds anymore. In fact, the winds will be onshore, which is a much more humid, a much cooler wind, and that will certainly help the firefighters. They do have to watch, though, for that wind shift, because they don't want to be trapped behind what we call enemy lines, as the winds are here, the fire is here and they don't want to be here as the wind shifts back on that wind shift. Wildfires>