SACRAMENTO -- — Exhausted firefighters continued to wage a blaze-by-blaze battle Thursday against the swath of wildfires bedeviling the state, with the biggest showdown looming in Butte County as flames plowed toward several tiny backwoods towns and threatened the town of Paradise.
That 48,000-acre blaze in Northern California was elevated to the top firefighting priority in the state after destroying as many as 50 homes earlier this week. It is being fought by more than 3,000 firefighters in triple-digit temperatures under a thick pall of smoke and tricky breezes that are whipping up the flames.
A massive blaze in Big Sur, meanwhile, hit a Zen monastery deep in the Los Padres National Forest, but five Buddhist monks who remained behind helped beat back the flames, which claimed just three small buildings on the edges of the 160-acre retreat.
"Praise the Buddha," said Keither Meyerhoff, a spokesman for the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center who talked to the monks via satellite phone. "The fire roared in from three sides, then let off when it hit because we'd been doing so much watering that the humidity was high."
Farther down the coast in Santa Barbara County, the 9,400-acre Gap fire that had posed a threat to the city of Goleta last week before being turned back was burning through chaparral in rugged areas north of Goleta. And to the east in Kern County, the Piute fire had blackened 34,000 acres and destroyed half a dozen homes south of Lake Isabella and threatened more than 1,000 more.
The biggest immediate threat, however, was in Butte County, where dozens of homes have been hit and flames continued to bear down on the hamlets of Yankee Hill and Jarbo Gap.
Fire engines took up sentry posts at homes, bulldozers raced the clock to carve fire breaks and helicopters stood poised to wage an aerial war.
"We're trying to take a stand for those homes," said Daniel Berlant of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
As the fire raced south along the east bank of an arm of the Feather River, bulldozers were busy on the west side plowing fire lines to keep embers from igniting a new blaze there. If flames were to reach the west side, they could stampede toward Paradise, a town of more than 30,000 north of Sacramento that was hit by mass evacuations after another fire claimed more than 75 homes just weeks ago.
