Fire crews advance in Mendocino

<p>Firefighters continued to report progress Tuesday in combating more than 100 fires in Mendocino County and almost 1,500 throughout the state.</p><p>“The word we got is the Northern California fires are looking good. We’re making a lot of headway and progress on those fires overall,” said Tracy Boudreaux, spokeswoman for state forestry.</p><p>In Mendocino County, outside the national forest, 123 fires started on June 20 and 21 with a series of lightning strikes.</p><p>Of those, the most recent evaluations showed 80 fires are contained, Boudreaux said.</p><p>The remaining 43 fires have lower levels of containment. Some fires near residential communities, including Orr Hot Springs, have minimal containment and those communities remain under evacuation warnings.</p><p>“We’re still concerned about some of the fires, we still have communities with warnings going on,” Boudreaux said.</p><p>Getting a perimeter, or containment, around a fire is a vital step in keeping it from spreading. But even contained, those fires remain burning. Firefighters hoped Tuesday to move into many of the contained fires to get them under control.</p><p>Some of the remaining fires were left to burn because of the remote, rugged locations and lack of threat to structures. Many of those were very small and are no longer worrisome, Boudreaux said.</p><p>Overall, an estimated 37,700 acres in Mendocino County have burned, up from Monday’s estimate of 37,200 acres.</p><p>The cost of fighting the fires has risen to $9,924,000. </p><p>While state forestry officials concentrate on their fires, national forest officials are coordinating efforts on more than 30 blazes in the Mendocino National Forest, which includes land in Mendocino, Humboldt and Lake counties.</p>