(Bloomberg) -- A dry, windy weekend has raised the wildfire threat across Southern California, including a patch of Santa Barbara County where the risk is critical.

Winds gusting between 50 to 70 miles (80 to 112 kilometers) per hour along with crackling dry air will persist through late Sunday, raising the chance that trees and power lines get knocked down and “likely rapid growth of any new fire that starts,” the National Weather Service said in a warning.

“Strong winds and low relative humidity -- that is the perfect combination for enhancing the wildfire danger,” Andrew Orrison, a forecaster with the U.S. Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, said by telephone. “Once we get through the end of this weekend the fire danger will come down a little bit.”

Wildfires are a rising hazard across California and have caused problems for the state’s electrical utilities. Two years of blazes helped push PG&E Corp., the state’s biggest utility owner, into bankruptcy after its equipment was identified as the cause of raging blazes that included the Camp Fire in November 2018 that killed 86 people and destroyed an entire town.

Read More: After Years of Fiery Hell, California Gets Less of a Scorching

This month, the company responded by cutting power to residents across northern and central California to make sure its equipment didn’t cause harm again. The company said the action may have helped prevent fires as high winds tangled power lines with trees, and knocked down utility poles.

Inside this weekend’s high-risk area is the Saddleridge Fire, a blaze that’s been burning for more than a week, has consumed almost 9,000 acres (3,642 hectares) and is more than 70% contained, according to the California Department of Forestry & Fire Protection, commonly called Cal Fire.

Across California, as well as nationally, the total acres consumed by wildfires has dropped this year, but the threat will remain until winter’s typical steady rain and snow arrives.

Through Oct. 13, California wildfires had consumed 162,693 acres, which lags the fire-year average of 372,066 acres, according to Cal Fire. Nationally, about 4.5 million acres have burned, below the 10-year average of 6.2 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

In the short term, the weather won’t be helping California, Orrison said.

“Certainly no rain over the weekend,” Orrison said. “The next time they could get rain is over a week from now and probably longer than that and that pretty much goes for the entire state of California. The threat of fires is going to tend to be ongoing as we go through the rest of the month out there.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian K. Sullivan in Boston at bsullivan10@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tina Davis at tinadavis@bloomberg.net, Steve Geimann, Ros Krasny

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