SAN DIEGO - Firefighters gained the upper hand on nearly all of the California wildfires on Thursday as winds died down after five days battling 20 fires from the mountains north of Los Angeles down to the Mexican border.
Most of the 500,000 people in the largest evacuation in California's modern history were on their way home, officials said. Some 1,600 homes have been destroyed since Sunday.
Two burned bodies were found in a house in hard-hit San Diego County, bringing the death toll to at least eight. Most were elderly who died while being evacuated.
"This is a better day than any we've had since this thing started," San Diego County Sheriff Bill Kolender said.
President George W. Bush, who declared California's wildfires a "major disaster," was due to survey the damage with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday and check on the government's response.
"It's a sad situation out there in southern California. I fully understand that the people have got a lot of anguish in their hearts and they just need to know a lot of folks care about them," Bush said before leaving the White House.
He said he wanted to make sure California was receiving the help it needed to deal with the wildfires.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, criticized along with Bush for a slow response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, had 1,000 people on the ground in badly scorched San Diego County.
Though fire officials were relieved that the hot, dry Santa Ana winds driving the flames had weakened, they conceded that offshore breezes replacing them presented a danger. Even those milder winds could fan the flames, being fought by some 9,000 weary men and women.
