Firefighters Make Headway on California Blazes

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• JEFFREY KAYE, NewsHour Correspondent:

  Firefighters wearily moved into a second weekend of work, but with renewed hope. Cooler weather helped ground and air assaults against the massive fires, which are mostly away from residential areas.

  With the discovery of four charred bodies on this hillside near the Mexican border, the death toll related to the California fires neared 20 by this afternoon, and officials expect to find more victims.

  Nearly half-a-million acres have been scorched by the fires; that's twice the size of New York City. At least 1,800 homes have been destroyed, 80 percent of them in San Diego County. Five fires continue to burn in the San Diego area, one near Camp Pendleton Marine Base, two others fires farther east, and two more to the south.

  More than 10,000 firefighters are still on the front lines. The main firefighting efforts have moved from the suburbs to the backcountry, where crews are still struggling to contain the blazes.

  Using muscles and chainsaws, fire crews from around the west are trying to prevent remote fires from getting to structures in the more sparsely populated neighborhoods.

  Perhaps counterintuitively, these firefighters set fires. Bobby Willis heads a 22-member hotshot crew from Northern California. There are dozens of these federally funded teams which specialize in fighting wildfires here from around the country to combat these blazes.

  Why do you want to consume this brush? What's the point?

• CHIEF BOBBY WILLIS, Hotshot Crew:

  To create a fire break, because the black line is the best fire break, because once it's already burned, it's not going to come up through here again.