KLAMATH RIVER, Calif. • California firefighters made gains against the state’s deadliest and largest wildfire of the year just as an entire eastern Washington town was being evacuated Thursday because of a blaze that was burning homes.

About 1:30 p.m. the Adams County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook that about 10 homes in Lind had burned.

“At this time all residents of the town of Lind need to evacuate immediately,” the sheriff’s office said in the post.

Lind is a community of about 500 people approximately 75 miles southwest of Spokane.

The State Fire Marshal’s office said the blaze had burned through about 3.1 square miles. Homes, infrastructure and crops were threatened. The cause of the fire was under investigation.

Meanwhile, in California, forecasters warned Thursday that spiking temperatures and plunging humidity levels could create conditions for further wildfire growth.

After five days of no containment, the McKinney fire in Siskiyou County near the Oregon border was 10% surrounded by Wednesday evening.

Bulldozers and hand crews were making progress carving firebreaks around much of the rest of the blaze, fire officials said.

At the fire’s southeastern corner, evacuation orders for sections of Yreka, home to about 7,800 people, were downgraded to warnings, allowing residents to return home but with a caution that the situation remained dangerous.

About 1,300 people remained under evacuation orders, officials said at a community meeting Wednesday evening.

The fire didn’t advance much at midweek, following several days of brief but heavy rain from thunderstorms that provided cloudy, damper weather. But as the clouds clear and humidity levels drops in the coming days, the fire could roar again, authorities warned.

“This is a sleeping giant right now,” said Darryl Laws, a unified incident commander on the blaze.

Weekend temperatures could reach triple digits as the region dries out again, said meteorologist Brian Nieuwenhuis with the National Weather Service office in Medford, Oregon.

“The heat, the dry conditions, along with afternoon breezes, that’s the kind of thing that could keep the fire pretty active,” he said Thursday.

The blaze broke out last Friday and has charred nearly 92 square miles of forestland, left tinder-dry by drought.

More than 100 homes and other buildings have burned and four bodies have been found, including two in a burned car in a driveway.

The blaze was driven at first by fierce winds ahead of a thunderstorm cell. More storms earlier this week proved a mixed blessing.

A drenching rain Tuesday dumped up to 3 inches on some eastern sections of the blaze but most of the fire area got next to nothing, said Dennis Burns, a fire behavior analyst.

The latest storm also brought concerns about possible river flooding and mudslides.