California wildfires under control, evacuations and disruptions persist

More residents of Southern California have been urged to leave their homes despite calming winds that allowed a major aerial attack on wildfires.

The blazes in four days have destroyed hundreds of homes and blanketed Los Angeles County and surrounding areas in smoke.

More than 800 houses, mobile homes and apartments were destroyed by fires that have burned more than 34 square miles since breaking out on Thursday.

No deaths have been reported, but police brought in trained dogs on Sunday to search the rubble of a mobile home park where nearly 500 homes were destroyed. They did not find any bodies after searching about a third of the homes.

"This has been a very tough few days for the people of Southern California," governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said after touring the damage.

The smell of smoke pervaded metropolitan Los Angeles. Skyscrapers were silhouettes in an opaque sky, and concerns about air quality forced organisers to cancel a marathon in suburban Pasadena where 8,000 runners had planned to participate.

Fierce Santa Ana winds that fanned the fires on Saturday weakened on Sunday, allowing firefighters to set backfires to prevent flames from advancing to hillside neighborhoods.

Dying winds in Southern California allowed firefighters on Monday to gain a strong hold on three ferocious wildfires, but officials were still concerned that a wave of heat and low humidity might stoke more flames.

The weakening Santa Ana winds, which had reached near-hurricane strength over the weekend, gave firefighters their first real opposition against a series of destructive blazes that broke out on Thursday night and have forced tens of thousands of people to flee. As of Monday morning, firefighters had 80 percent of a wildfire in Santa Barbara contained, and 40 percent of a second, much larger one in Los Angeles under control.

A third, monstrous fire that started Saturday night in Riverside County and spread to Orange County, sweeping through upscale neighborhoods like Anaheim Hills, was also 40 percent contained Monday morning. That fire has burned through nearly 29,000 acres in two counties.

In less than four days, the three fires have destroyed hundreds of houses and mobile homes, and consumed about 40,000 acres in total, spreading patches of black across the daytime-skies in southern California. Officials believe that at least one of the fires, in the Santa Barbara area, was ignited by humans, possibly the result of a stray cigarette or uncontrolled campfire in Montecito, the Associated Press reported.

About 800 residences - ranging from multi-million-dollar mansions to modest prefabricated mobile homes - have been destroyed by a series of wind-whipped fires that erupted in the region over the weekend.

At least 50,000 evacuation orders have been issued and nearly 8900ha have been destroyed in the blazes, which have stretched from Santa Barbara to the southeast of Los Angeles.

A fire that struck in Los Angeles on Saturday was described as one of the worst to hit the city in nearly 50 years, but so far only 11 injuries have been reported across the entire region.

Urban search and rescue teams, including cadaver dogs, were sent yesterday into the ground zero of the Los Angeles fire - a mobile home park in the northern suburb of Sylmar, where more than 500 residences were incinerated.

Los Angeles Police Department deputy chief Michael Moore said about 30 per cent of the mobile home park had been searched and that no human remains had been found.

The cause of the fire remains unknown.