The majority of the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people who lived in the 10,000 homes that were evacuated earlier were allowed to return home on Monday evening, fire officials said.
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At least 18 dwellings burned over the weekend, and the body of one man was found on Saturday evening in a burned-out auto parked in the driveway of a home.
The body of 67-year-old Robert Bresnick was discovered in a burned-out auto outside a home on Saturday. Officials said that a man’s body was found in a burnt auto but are unsure whether the cause of death was from the fire or something else.
Most of the roughly 20,000 evacuees forced out by a wildfire in the Santa Clarita area of Southern California were cleared to go home, but firefighters still faced huge work Tuesday in taming an expansive wildfire in the mountains north of Los Angeles.
Firefighters were saddened that some structures were lost, he said, but “felt they lost additional structures because they had to stop what they were doing to help citizens evacuate”.
Firefighters battle the Sand Fire in Placerita Canyon on July 24. Firefighters found his body inside a burned vehicle that was parked in a driveway at a home on Iron Canyon Road.
They watched the drama unfold from a friend’s home in La Cañada Flintridge.
SMFD spokesman Dale Hallock said eight local firefighters participated in the effort to control what became massive brushfire, which spewed ash into Santa Monica and throughout the Westside over the weekend. “These are not normal times”, noted Los Angeles County Fire Chief Daryl Osby in NBC News.
“We got off pretty darn lucky”, Wayne Johnson said, surveying the burned hulk of their motor home and his stepson’s 1999 Corvette.
“That fire came through like a freight train”, John Tripp, incident commander with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, told the station.
Winter says his burned body was found about 20 minutes later in a vehicle in the driveway after flames had swept through the area. Jerry Brown who is at the Democratic National Convention with other top state officials, declared a state of emergency for both fires on Tuesday night.
“We set some backfires overnight in some of our areas of concern and this gave us space to contain the fire”.
Fire officials have said the Southland already has one of the largest fleets of firefighting aircraft in the country, and Antonovich said 28 aircraft were being used to battle the Sand Fire.
The L.A. County Sheriff’s said in a statement that power lines, debris and equipment are all considered safety concerns. Drones had previously been reported flying over the fire in the Bear Divide area.
More than 3,000 firefighters have been deployed to halt the blaze in the Santa Clarita Valley, according to the department.
Fire officials noted returning residents must provide proper identification, and that three areas, including Placerita Canyon Road from Running Horse Lane to Pacy Street, were still closed. Such conditions would signal explosive fire conditions, said Stuart Seto, weather specialist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
Firefighters have been dealing with hot, dry and windy conditions in recent days.
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The South Coast Air Quality Management District has issued another smoke advisory on Tuesday, saying that the smoke is expected to move north and northeast of the original site of the blaze.
