Californians go home, many to ashes

Thousands of Southern Californians returned home to find their houses burned to the ground, or miraculously intact yesterday, after a wind-whipped weekend firestorm swept through bone-dry canyons and hillsides.

"It was really hard when we first got here. It was shocking. We were all crying," Brittney Fowler, 23, said as she picked through the rubble of her family's large modern house in Yorba Linda, in Orange County.

Hot winds and record temperatures were in over 30˚C. Several fires burned through Sunday night and thick, choking smoke hung heavily over neighbourhoods 40 kilometres away.

Wildfires have scorched more than 20,000 acres since Thursday night in foothills north of Los Angeles, in Orange County canyons to the southeast, and in celebrity-heavy Montecito near Santa Barbara, to the north.