Patricia Foley and her nephew Govinda Saba look at Foley's burned out home Tuesday in the Bouquet Canyon area of the Angeles National Forest near Santa Clarita, Calif. Foley owned two homes on the property that were total losses.

San Diego ? Faced with unrelenting winds whipping wildfires into a frenzy across Southern California, firefighters conceded defeat on many fronts Tuesday to an unstoppable force that has chased more than 500,000 people away.

Unless the shrieking Santa Ana winds subside, and that’s not expected for at least a day, fire crews say they can do little more than try to wait it out and react – tamping out spot fires and chasing ribbons of airborne embers to keep new fires from flaring.

“If it’s this big and blowing with as much wind as it’s got, it’ll go all the way to the ocean before it stops,” said San Diego Fire Capt. Kirk Humphries. “We can save some stuff, but we can’t stop it.”

Tentacles of unpredictable, shifting flame have burned across nearly 600 square miles, killing one person, destroying more than 1,800 homes and prompting the biggest evacuation in California history, from north of Los Angeles, through San Diego to the Mexican border.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the flames were threatening 68,000 more homes.

“We have had an unfortunate situation that we’ve had three things come together: very dry areas, very hot weather and then a lot of wind,” Schwarzenegger said. “And so this makes the perfect storm for a fire.”

In Rancho Santa Fe, a suburb north of San Diego, houses burned just yards from where fire crews fought to contain flames engulfing other properties. In the mountain community of Lake Arrowhead, cabins and vacation homes went up in flames with no fire crews in sight.

“These winds are so strong, we’re not trying to fight this fire,” said firefighter Jim Gelrud, an engineer from Vista, Calif. “We’re just trying to save the buildings.”

More than a dozen wildfires blowing across Southern California since Sunday have also injured more than 45 people, including 21 firefighters. The U.S. Forest Service earlier reported a fire death in Los Angeles County’s Santa Clarita area, but officials said Tuesday that information was erroneous.

In San Diego County, authorities placed evacuation calls to more than 346,000 homes, said Luis Monteagudo, a spokesman for the county’s emergency effort. Based on census and other county data, 560,000 people were ordered to leave, said Ron Roberts, chairman of the San Diego Board of Supervisors.

President Bush, who planned to visit the region Thursday, declared a federal emergency for seven counties, a move that will speed disaster-relief efforts.