Like fires that killed 44 people and destroyed 8,900 structures in Napa and Sonoma counties in October, the current blazes have broken out in areas more suburban than rural.
A smaller fire has burned on the northern edge of Los Angeles, threatening the Sylmar and Lakeview Terrace neighborhoods and billowing smoke that has created a breathing hazard for millions.
‘All we’ve got’ The Ventura County fire erupted 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Los Angeles, near Santa Paula, where 30,000 people live among citrus and avocado orchards and farm fields lining the Santa Clara River.
More than 27,000 people have evacuated, and one firefighter suffered bumps and bruises in a vehicle accident in Ventura County.
Aerial footage shows dozens of homes in one neighborhood burned to the ground and a large subdivision in jeopardy as the flames spit out embers that could spark new blazes.
Mansions and apartments alike have burned up.
The Vista del Mar Hospital, which specializes in mental health and behavioral therapy, smoldered after burning overnight.
Wildfires are a consistent danger for Californians, and insurers have paid out $3.3 billion (€2.8 billion) in claims so far this year.
Hardly any measurable rain has fallen in the region in the past six months.
"It’s been a five, six-year drought so the fuel is just tinder dry and just as ripe as can be for fire spread," Chief Lorenzen said on Tuesday.

In the parched Manawatu district of Tokomaru/Linton, dairy farmers are feeding supplements to cows to keep them milking.
This is only the start of summer and we are seeing it so dry.
If it was at the end of summer in three months’ time, we’d expect it.
* Dry weather spells potential problems for farmers * Record dry weather triggers concerns over Christchurch water use Minister of Agriculture Damien O’Connor has asked officials to keep a close watch on how farmers and growers are managing in dry conditions, as the hot start to summer affects soil moisture levels across the country.
"Farmers and growers in many of our regions are experiencing lower than normal soil moisture levels for this time of year and are planning ahead to manage stock, feed, and water if they don’t get some decent rainfall over the next few weeks," he said.
Industry groups DairyNZ, Beef+Lamb and Federated Farmers said they were not pushing the panic button yet, but were urging farmers to prepare a plan to mitigate the impact.
"The dry weather has got farmers worried about feed to carry through to the summer, and so we’ve got all plants in the North and South Island fully operational now, whereas normally it would be later when we would see the plants hitting their straps.
The lambs could be processed for meat, but the smaller skins did not attract the same value and in some cases none at all.
"What’s been the challenge is that the dry weather has caused some farmers to have been less prepared as they might otherwise have been if they had been able to harvest silage and have more productive pastures.
It was too early to say what impact the dry weather would have on milk supply.

Cape Town – The Democratic Alliance has used its majority in the City of Cape Town council to push through a controversial drought levy which will see Capetonians coughing up more money for water according to the value of their properties.
Mayor Patricia de Lille said the levy, which will kick off in February next year and remain in place until 2021, will assist the City fund new water projects.
“In future years the drought charge would be required to raise funding of approximately R1bn per year while the dams recover from the unprecedented drought conditions,” said De Lille.
Opposition parties have however accused De Lille of failing to prioritise the water crisis in the city.
African Christian Democratic Party councillor Grant Haskin said: “We know that the drought was foreseeable and avoidable.
South African Weather Services confirmed that expected rainfall in Cape Town was worse in the 90s and early 2000.
“If the City had taken the water crisis seriously, we wouldn’t be here trying to adjust the budget for the first time in the City of Cape Town,” said Haskin.
* For the full story see Wednesday’s Cape Times

Agriculture is the economic engine that powers the Great Plains, the vast stretch of treeless prairie that covers parts of 10 states – and where the next drought can appear with little warning.
Now there’s a powerful new tool to help provide farmers and ranchers in the arid western United States critical early indications of oncoming droughts, and its name is EDDI.
EDDI, or the Evaporative Demand Drought Index, is the brainchild of Mike Hobbins, a CIRES scientist working at NOAA’s Boulder lab, to estimate the changing “thirst” of the atmosphere.
“Evaporative demand is the thirst of the atmosphere for any water: on the surface, in lakes and rivers, in the ground or in plants,” Hobbins said.
Surface moisture is really hard to measure because a major component is soil moisture, which varies dramatically over very short distances.
Evaporative demand is relatively easy to measure because it’s based on air temperature, humidity, wind speed, and solar radiation, which we measure all the time.” Proven in the field Over the past few years, EDDI has steadily demonstrated its potential, accurately signaling the development of a 2015 drought in Wyoming and 2016 droughts in South Dakota’s Black Hills and the southeastern United States.
For Mark Svoboda, co-founder of the U.S. Drought Monitor, that was what he needed to see.
“What’s unique about it is that it detects drought emergence at weekly time scales.
“When we got to June and July, things started to happen fast: crop conditions were tanking, we started seeing a lot of heat – EDDI was pretty much all over it at that point.” [This map of Evaporative Demand Drought Index values across the U.S. for the 30 days prior to June 1 shows the relative “thirst” of the atmosphere in the northern Great Plains as a severe drought began to take hold.]
The U.S Famine Early Warning System network, which helps governments and relief agencies plan for and respond to humanitarian crises, has also begun using EDDI to help provide early warning of food insecurity (limited access to sufficient food supply) around the world.

BOSASO, Somalia (Reuters) – Somalia’s semi-autonomous region of Puntland declared a state of emergency on Tuesday and appealed for food and water because of shortages triggered by a severe drought.
Drought has gripped large parts of the Horn of Africa country this year and the United Nations says children face acute malnutrition.
The crisis is compounded by al Shabaab’s Islamist insurgency that seeks to topple the central government that is backed by African Union peacekeepers and the West.
Al Shabaab militants carry out bombings in the capital Mogadishu and other regions.
Militants killed more than 500 people in the capital in an attack last month.
Puntland’s government said 34,000 households across the region are affected by the drought due to the failure of successive rainy seasons.
Puntland “launched a wide-ranging humanitarian appeal to secure food, water and other resources for the affected region,” a government statement said.
It said 70 percent of the area faced extreme drought and was unlikely to receive rain for five months.
Militant attacks in Puntland are rare compared to the rest of Somalia mainly because its security forces are relatively regularly paid and receive substantial U.S. assistance.
But this year there has been an upsurge in violence as al Shabaab and a splinter group linked to Islamic State have attacked government troops.

Alongside the obvious perils for polar bears and other wildlife, as well as the problem of rising ocean levels, the massive ice thaw thousands of miles away is triggering changes in the atmosphere that are likely to shrink rainfall close to home, according to new research by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Their study outlines a chain of meteorological events that leads to formation of storm-blocking air masses in the North Pacific.
The masses are similar to the so-called Ridiculously Resilient Ridge that kept rain from making landfall during California’s five-year drought, forcing widespread water rationing in homes, prompting farmers to fallow fields and causing the Central Valley to sink due to heavy pumping of groundwater.
The Livermore Lab study, being published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, doesn’t attempt to explain the recent drought, but to help understand future weather patterns.
As such dry spells become more common, the state will average 10 to 15 percent less rain over the long haul, she estimated.
The study comes amid efforts to understand the relationship between drought and climate change.
While higher temperatures are known to increase drying through evaporation, the link between global warming and rainfall has remained in dispute.
Stanford University Earth system scientist Noah Diffenbaugh and UCLA climate researcher Daniel Swain have suggested that upticks in greenhouse gases have created conditions favorable to high-pressure systems, which generally push the east-moving Pacific storm track northward and result in dry conditions in California.
The Livermore Lab study maintains that Arctic activity is hastening the tropical influence.
“The influence from the Arctic doesn’t go first to California; it goes to the tropics.” Cvijanovic and her colleagues acknowledge that they’re far from being able to forecast long-term weather patterns for California.

New Zealand could be heading for a drought, according to Weather Watch.
In an article published on Tuesday morning, the weather authority speculated that the "exceptional" dryness in parts of the country combined with unseasonal heat could have a devastating impact through the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018.
"Unless something major changes in New Zealand’s weather patterns droughts may very well form in parts of the country," said the article.
Metservice declined to comment on whether a drought is on the cards, but meteorologist Tom Adams did say that December will "quite possibly" see heat records broken around the country.
"What we’re seeing is an abnormally long dry spell," he told Newshub.
There has been record-breaking dryness in multiple locations such as Westport, which is on its 24th consecutive dry day, and Hokitika, which has had 19 consecutive dry days.
A dry day is defined as a period of 24 hours with less than one millilitre of rainfall.
Mr Adams said there is some humidity and rainfall in store for upper regions of both the North and South Islands, which will bring more typical December weather to these locations.
He also said that north-easterlies are predicted for the East Coast, which should bring "average rainfall" to places like Napier, which faced running out of water on Monday night.
Newshub.

"Since Harvey, we have had 90 days of below-normal rainfall and average monthly temperatures have been 5 degrees above normal," according to Nikki Hathaway, meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Houston.
The main threat from the drought at this point is wildfires: "Fire is the primary potential impact, and wet followed by dry is the standard recipe for lots of dry fuels," said John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist.
And while it’s too soon for any water supply impacts, summer reservoir inflows in the Hill Country were third-lowest on record, according to Bob Rose of the Lower Colorado River Authority.
Dozens of people were killed and damage estimates from the storm were at least $100 billion, likely more.
This includes the entire Houston metro area, much of which was underwater in late August due to Hurricane Harvey.
Houston had its 4th-driest November on record, according to the Southeast Regional Climate Center.
It’s not only Texas.
A dry November also increased drought conditions in Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, said Oklahoma’s state climatologist, Gary McManus.
(Photo: U.S. Drought Monitor) The cause of the weather pattern shift can be traced to La Niña, a periodic cooling of ocean water in the Pacific Ocean that affects weather patterns across the U.S. and around the world.
The Climate Prediction Center said that drought is expected to persist or intensify across the nation’s entire southern tier through the winter, all the way from California to South Carolina.

And it’s underground.
Farmers in eight American states currently depend on it for their livelihood.
Irrigation wells are pumping out water faster than rainfall can refill it.
The U.S. Geological Survey said in June that the aquifer lost 3.5 trillion gallons between 2013 and 2015.
The Ogallala Aquifer is not going dry due to climate change—rainfall on the Great Plains has actually increased.
It is drying up due to industrial irrigation of farmland.
In the past, farmers included grazing animals in their crop rotation.
But now, industrial farms are sucking organic content out of the soil, exposing the land to the sun, and pumping huge amounts of water out of the ground.
The land sabbath requires the land to lie fallow once every seven years.
To learn why laws like the land sabbath apply to Americans living above the Ogallala Aquifer and beyond, request The United States and Britain in Prophecy, by Herbert W. Armstrong.

The drought in the Western Cape was becoming a colossal challenge as the province headed into uncharted waters.
This was according to the WWF’s Fresh Water senior manager, Christine Colvin.
She said that farmers, businesses and individuals needed to prepare themselves for the “new normal,” with long-term climate predictions indicating that the region would become increasingly drier in the coming years.
“Up in the northern parts of South Africa, extreme increases in rainfall can be expected, particularly in intense events that are going to result into severe flooding.
For the Western Cape, a decrease in rainfall can be expected,” she said.
Colvin said that this would result in the Western Cape experiencing more and longer drought periods.
She added that scientists were confidently predicting what was likely to happen within the next two decades, but not how this would manifest in the next two to eight years.
“We are now in the third year of drought.
We don’t know what lies ahead.
“We can no longer afford to use the little water we have just once.