A San Bernardino County Sheriff Department helicopter does a water drop on a RV and truck on fire during a wildfire in Devore, Calif., on Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2016.
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“In my 40 years of fighting fire I have never seen a fire behavior so extreme as it was yesterday”, Mike Wakoski, a commander with the incident team, told reporters. The fast moving fire grew almost 10,000 acres overnight, fire officials said.
Smoke rises from a burned out grove of trees at the Blue Cut wildfire in Wrightwood, California, on August 17, 2016.
(AP Photo/Noah Berger). A dish towel hangs in front of a burned out residence on Highway 138 after the Blue Cut Fire burned through Phelan, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. 18, 2016. The flames advanced despite the efforts of 1,300 firefighters.
Firefighters continue to battle flames that have climbed the rugged flanks of the San Gabriel Mountains, threatening communities including the ski town of Wrightwood at an elevation of almost 6,000 feet.
Authorities estimated that only half of the 4,500 residents of Wrightwood had heeded evacuation orders.
While firefighters had managed to carve containment lines around only 4 percent of the blaze, state transit officials said northbound lanes of Interstate 15 would reopen in the area.
After a destructive fire season a year ago, 2016 is shaping up to be equally bad.
The fire started as a small brush fire along the freeway Tuesday but it soon morphed into a massive blaze fueled by gusty winds and dry vegetation.
“It burns that much quicker, that much hotter”.
“This moved so fast”, said Darren Dalton, 51, who along with his wife and son had to get out of his house in Wrightwood.
Firefighters have yet to tally property losses but indicate there have been many.
“It’s just stuff”, he said of his possessions.
Cal Fire Capt. Gretchen Gonzales said the “winds have been awful” Wednesday as her Thousand Palms crew worked to successfully protect the communities in Lytle Creek, where Sheep Canyon and Lytle Creek roads meet.
“What makes it dry is a lack of rain, of course, and the opposite of rain, [which is] lots of evapotranspiration, and that leads to excessive drying that’s really dessicating those timbers – the timber and grasses – and turning them into a real tinder box”, said Jay Famiglietti, professor of Earth System Science and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine.
Boyd had a stern warning for those who chose not to heed evacuation orders.
Fire tornadoes are erupting out of rampant wildfires east of Los Angeles, according to local media reports.
Travel was returning to normal Thursday in the pass – a major corridor for trucking, rail and commuter traffic – after Interstate 15 was fully reopened. No deaths have been reported in the latest fire, but crews assessing property damage were using cadaver dogs during searches.
Residents like Vi Delgado and her daughter April Christy were among those wondering whether their home was intact, though they had found out that their pets and the shelter animals they take care of had been saved.
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“No joke, we were literally being chased by the fire”, Christy said in a voice choked with emotion in a minivan outside the Fontana evacuation center.
