Good morning.
(Want to get California Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.)
“We came here for the last few days with sometimes worsening news. We are pleased to be here with better news today.”
The sun was setting as Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles offered that report Thursday night, opening the second briefing of his day. The smell of smoke still wafted in the air, and he was talking in a park filled with firefighters, emergency vehicles, police officers and camera crews. But the San Fernando Valley sky, which two days ago had been thick with smoke, was mostly clear and the hills were no longer orange with fire.
Other parts of California were not faring so well — fires were churning through San Diego and Ventura. And the good news came with what has become familiarly disturbingly caveats: Winds remain perilously high, there is not a drop of rain in the forecast, so conditions could always turn bad.
But Mr. Garcetti was finally delivering some welcome news to a city put on edge not only by the fires but a countywide emergency alert that buzzed on phones across the region Wednesday night. “This is a fire that is burning much less intensely,” Mr. Garcetti said.
Most of the evacuees would be allowed to return home. Restrictions on parking put in place on narrow roads were being lifted.
Continue reading the main storyThis was the sixth time that Mr. Garcetti had given one of this briefings and once again, he was flanked by two men who have been key in coordinating this response: the fire chief, Ralph M. Terrazas, and the police chief, Charlie Beck. Mr. Terrazas, who Mr. Garcetti promoted to what in this city is a particularly important job, has been briefing Mr. Garcetti before his news conferences, reporting to the mayor every few hours on the latest development.
On Monday, at the mayor’s weekly cabinet meeting, Mr. Terrazas warned the mayor about extreme conditions that could lead to disastrous fires later that week. He was proved right the next day, though he was not ready on Thursday to declare game over.
“This has been a long week and we are not done yet,” Mr. Terrazas said, wearing a protective yellow jacket and an L.A.F.D. cap. “Tomorrow morning will be Day 5 of a multiday Santa Ana event.”
“You can see some improvement,” Mr. Terrazas said, referring to fire conditions. “But it’s still in extreme range.”
More Coverage From The Times of the California Fires:
Follow live updates today here.
What to take and when to evacuate
‘It Burns and It Keeps Burning’: Scenes From Southern California’s Wildfires
California’s Fires By the Numbers
Maps: Where the Fires Are Spreading in Southern California
In a Warming California, a Future of Flames
California Online Fires Edition
(Please note: We regularly highlight articles on news sites that have limited access for nonsubscribers.)
• Big weaponry arrives to battle the fires: a 747 Supertanker. Big enough for Murrieta in Riverside County — but too big for the tricky canyons of Los Angeles. [Los Angeles Daily News]
• Help from northern neighbors as well. Bay Area firefighters rush down to lend a hand in Southern California. “We’re just repaying the favor.” [San Francisco Chronicle]
• The Lilac fire sent hundreds of thoroughbreds on a panicked run around the track, trying to escape the smoke and flames at San Luis Rey Downs, 45 miles north of San Diego. “There’s a lot of dead horses.” [San Diego Union-Tribune]
• Fighting back: A resolve to rebuild in the hills of Ventura. [Ventura County Star]
• Destroyed in the wake of the California fires: mobile homes in a retirement community. [Sacramento Bee]
• Another point of view from the director of the California Chaparral Institute: California is burning because of bad planning — not because of a natural disaster. [Los Angeles Times]
• How do wildfires start? People. “Humans are the only sources of fires during Santa Ana winds.” Part of this argument is that power lines, which cause a lot of fires, wouldn’t exist without people. [The Orange County Register]
• Check out this photoessay of “otherworldly scenes” as the Thomas fire burns through the night. [Los Angeles Times]
Here’s some non-fire news
• The Republican tax bill moving through Congress scales back incentives for wind and solar power, and could raise energy costs for states like California. [The New York Times]
• The California State Senate is about to gets its first woman president. Toni Atkins, a San Diego Democrat, also will be the first openly gay leader of the Senate. [Sacramento Bee]
• Rep. Devin Nunes, the Tulare Republican, was cleared by the House Ethics Committee of disclosing classified information related to the House Russia investigation. [Fresno Bee]
• This may not actually be news anymore: Home prices in the Bay Area shot up last month. [The Mercury News]
• Exhibits at the Hammer Museum, the California African-American Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art make The New York Times’ best art list for 2017. [New York Times]
And Finally …
Throughout its time in office, the Obama administration was dogged by Republican state attorneys general who filed lawsuits tying up in court its policies on matters like health care and immigration. Now, the Trump administration is facing the same kind of assault from Democratic state attorneys general like Xavier Becerra of California.
Mr. Becerra, a former congressman from Los Angeles who was appointed California attorney general this year to succeed Kamala Harris when she became a United States senator, has filed around 20 lawsuits against the federal government, challenging its policies on scaling back environmental regulations, cracking down on immigration enforcement, and more.
But, speaking to New York Times reporters during a visit to Washington this week, Mr. Becerra sidestepped a suggestion that he was taking a page from the playbook of Obama-era Republican attorneys general like Scott Pruitt — the Trump administration’s deregulation-minded head of the Environmental Protection Agency who rose to national prominence as Oklahoma attorney general by suing the Obama administration, and who is now being sued by Mr. Becerra.
“I haven’t opened one of their books,” Mr. Becerra said. “We’re doing this because it’s existential for California to be able to continue doing what we’re doing.”
“We have, by a factor of about 10, more clean-energy jobs in California than there are jobs in the entire coal mining industry,” he said. “All of that could be put at risk by all of these rollbacks.”
— Charlie Savage, national security and legal affairs reporter in Washington
California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com.
California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.
Continue reading the main story