SAN DIEGO -- All evacuation orders were lifted Sunday as firefighters gained the upper hand on the remaining four of nearly a dozen blazes that tore through Southern California last week.
Meanwhile, Gov. Jerry Brown warned he was gearing up for what could be the drought-stricken region's worst wildfire season ever. He told ABC's This Week that the state has 5,000 firefighters and has appropriated $600 million to battling blazes, but that may not be enough.
"We're getting ready for the worst," Brown said. "Now, we don't want to anticipate before we know, but we need a full complement of firefighting capacity."
The state firefighting agency went to peak staffing in the first week of April, instead of its usual start in mid-May.
Thousands of additional firefighters may be needed in the future, Brown said.
All evacuation orders were lifted Sunday as ocean breezes and lower temperatures helped firefighters take on the blazes. They included a 4-square-mile fire that started in the suburb of San Marcos and three brush fires at Camp Pendleton.
Unusually high temperatures, low humidity and gusty winds set conditions last week for the string of wildfires that broke out in San Diego County, causing more than $20 million in damage.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has responded to more than 1,500 fires this year, compared with about 800 during an average year.
"And in the years to come, we're going to have to make very expensive investments and adjust," Brown said. "And the people are going to have to be careful of how they live, how they build their homes and what kind of vegetation is allowed to grow around them."
Firefighters over the weekend scoured charred hillsides north of San Diego to guard against a resurgence of flames.
The fires spanning 39 square miles chewed a destructive path through San Diego County, destroying at least 47 houses, an 18-unit apartment complex and three businesses. A badly burned body was found in a transient camp, and one firefighter suffered heat exhaustion.
Most homes were destroyed in two suburbs about 30 miles north of San Diego -- San Marcos, an inland commuter city of new housing tracts, and Carlsbad, a coastal community and home of Legoland California.
Meanwhile, reports indicate the Southern California wildfires offer a glimpse of a warmer and more fiery future.
In the past three months, at least three different studies and reports have warned that wildfires are getting bigger, that man-made climate change is to blame, and it's only going to get worse with more fires starting earlier in the year. While scientists are reluctant to blame climate change for any specific fire, they have been warning for years about how it will lead to more fires and earlier fire seasons.
"The fires in California and here in Arizona are a clear example of what happens as the Earth warms, particularly as the West warms, and the warming caused by humans is making fire season longer and longer with each decade," said University of Arizona geoscientist Jonathan Overpeck. "It's certainly an example of what we'll see more of in the future."
Since 1984, the area burned by the West's largest wildfires -- those of more than 1,000 acres -- have increased by about 87,700 acres a year, according to an April study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. And the areas where fire has been increasing the most are areas where drought has been worsening and "that certainly points to climate being a major contributor," the study's main author, Philip Dennison of the University of Utah, said Friday.
The top five years with the most acres burned have happened in the past decade, according to federal records. From 2010-13, about 6.4 million acres per year burned on average; in the 1980s it was 2.9 million acres per year.
"We are going to see increased fire activity all across the West as the climate warms," Dennison said.
That was one of a dozen "key messages" in the 841-page National Climate Assessment released by the federal government earlier this month. It mentioned wildfires 200 times.
"Increased warming, drought and insect outbreaks, all caused by or linked to climate change have increased wildfires and impacts to people and ecosystems in the Southwest," the federal report said. "Fire models project more wildfire and increased risks to communities across extensive areas."
Likewise, the Nobel prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted in March that wildfires are on the rise in the western U.S., have killed 103 Americans in 30 years, and will likely get worse.
The immediate cause of the fires can be anything from lightning to arson; the first of the San Diego area fires seemed to start from sparks from faulty construction equipment working on a graded field, said California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesman Lynne Tolmachoff.
Information for this article was contributed by Elliot Spagat and Seth Borenstein of The Associated Press.
A Section on 05/19/2014