If conditions remain favorable, officials hope to contain the fire's eastern flank today.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke to firefighters and evacuees Saturday at the Santa Barbara command center about the statewide fire siege that began two weeks ago when lightning strikes touched off hundreds of fires in Northern and Central California.
"When you wake up one morning and have 500 fires across the state, it was a real shock to me . . . only to find the next morning there were 1,000 fires, and the next morning 1,400 fires, and then 1,700 fires igniting over 14 days," Schwarzenegger said.
The governor pushed his emergency response initiative, which he hopes will pass with the current budget. "Something is happening, clearly. There's more need for resources than ever before," he said. "It's fire season all year round. . . . It's a different ballgame, so we have to respond."
Santa Barbara County Fire Chief John Scherrei told the governor that since the Gap fire started Tuesday, "there were times, honestly, when I thought we'd be losing 100 homes."
Despite a mandatory evacuation order, Rick Davis, 44, and his wife, Michelle, refused to leave their home in the hills above Santa Barbara. Davis said he had cleared 300 to 400 feet of brush and had regulation fire hoses and extra water.
"I'll go down to the gym and people will say: 'What have you been doing today?' and I'll say: 'I've been doing my brush clearing' and they'd look at me like: 'What the heck?' " Davis said, adding that the vast majority of his neighbors had not done appropriate brush clearance.
About 200 miles north, the tenacious, long-running Big Sur fire continued to overwhelm firefighters. About 1,800 homes remained threatened.
As of 6 p.m. Saturday, the Big Sur blaze, which started June 21 and is called the Basin Complex fire, had burned more than 71,000 acres; 22 structures have been destroyed; and three firefighters have suffered minor heat-related injuries, said fire information officer Mark Savage. Evacuation orders extend to more than 850 people.
Even though more than 2,300 firefighters bolstered their lines, the blaze grew on the north and south, and winds were stronger than expected.
"They made progress, but the fire did as well," said Sarah Gibson, a spokeswoman at the command center.
