Firefighters in Southern California have made progress in their battle against a slew of wildfires that have killed at least one person, destroyed hundreds of buildings and forced more than 200,000 people from their homes.
As the dry Santa Ana winds that have fuelled the blazes abated slightly, officials lifted evacuation orders for parts of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, and crews started getting the upper hand in containing some of the area's major fires.
But with the National Weather Service expecting a pickup in top wind velocity to 89km/h on Sunday from 64km/h, the 8,700 firefighters battling six fast-moving blazes were under pressure to work fast.
"We're far from being out of the woods on any of them," Ken Pimlott, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), told a news briefing in Ventura on Saturday.
Since the fires began erupting on Monday, nearly 800 buildings have been destroyed, most of them in Ventura County where the Thomas Fire, the largest of the blazes, has charred 59,893 hectares, an area about the size of Chicago, officials said.
California Governor Jerry Brown told reporters that climate change had helped make intense fires such as these the state's "new normal."
They "could happen every year or every few years," he said.
"They're happening all the time - this one is just more intense. It's been a terrible tragedy for so many people."
The fires, which have threatened Californians from Santa Barbara County down the Pacific Coast to Mexico, have claimed at least one human casualty.
The fires have put property worth billions of dollars at risk in California, where wildfires in the northern part of the state in October resulted in insured losses of more than $US9 billion ($A13 billion). Those fires, concentrated in the state's wine country, killed 43 people.
At their peak, this week's fires drove about 212,000 Californians from their homes. But the lifting of several evacuation orders reduced the number of people displaced from their homes to 87,000 on Saturday.
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