Dry, shifting winds kept weary firefighters off balance Monday as the Southern California fires advanced along three major fronts, one of them pushing into the northwestern reaches of the city of Los Angeles.
By Monday night, the three-day toll stood at 14 dead, 1,518 homes destroyed and more than 500,000 acres burned.
Wind and visibility improved enough for air tankers to join the firefight, and tenacious crews beat back flames from the Ventura County city of Fillmore. By late Monday afternoon, weather forecasters said, a shift had begun toward cooler, moister conditions -- the best possible news for those whose homes lie in the paths of the fires.
Satellite image -- A satellite image of Southern California and its coast that ran in Tuesday's Section A with a map showing developments in Southland fires showed conditions on Sunday, not Monday, as text accompanying the map implied.
But the 10 separate blazes stubbornly persisted, threatening more homes and lives in a broken arc from Ventura County east to San Bernardino County and south to Tijuana.
"This will be the most expensive fire in California history, both in loss of property and the cost of fighting it," Dallas Jones, director of the state Office of Emergency Services, said in a telephone news conference Monday. He said he could not yet estimate the extent of the loss.
The most expensive fire in the state's history has been the Oakland Hills fire of October 1991, which had property losses estimated at $1.75 billion, a figure that would be considerably higher today because of rising property values. Three thousand homes were destroyed and 25 people died in that fire.
San Diego County has been hardest hit by the latest series of fires -- at least three under investigation as possible arson -- and lost dozens more homes Monday when flames jumped across Interstate 8 and rampaged through the Crest and Alpine communities in the mountains east of San Diego. Among the houses destroyed was that of Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine), who had been critical of Gov. Gray Davis for not responding aggressively enough to the fire.
Fire crews fought desperately to keep that fire from joining another and creating what one firefighter worried would be an "unstoppable hurricane of fire."
One fire crossed the Mexican border into Tijuana, and an unrelated fire destroyed 10 homes near Ensenada.
San Diego officials dramatically increased their damage accounts Monday after damage-assessment teams fanned out across the county to examine fire-ravaged neighborhoods.
By the end of the day, they had more than doubled their count of destroyed homes to more than 900, making these fires the most destructive in the county's history.
