The fire erupted Friday afternoon in the Sand Canyon area of suburban Santa Clarita near State Route 14 as the region was gripped by high heat and very low humidity. No homes are i…
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The Sand Fire broke out Friday in the Santa Clarita Valley, burning through heavy brush on hillsides tinder dry from a subpar year for rain in Southern California. A wildfire north of Los Angeles has now burned about 2.3 square miles of bone-dry hillside.
No homes were immediately threatened in the sparsely populated area.
A fast-moving wildfire that has already blackened some 11,000 acres (4,450 hectares) of drought-parched land northwest of Los Angeles was threatening some 1,000 structures on Saturday, fire officials said.
About 300 homes were under mandatory or voluntary evacuations, but none had burned.
The area was one of several neighborhoods ordered evacuated as the fire raged through bone-dry canyons and ranchlands.
The Santa Clarita area is under a “red flag warning” issued by the National Weather Service, meaning weather conditions and dry vegetation are combined for what the weather service calls “extreme fire danger and/or fire behavior”.
By Saturday evening there was good news: The winds had changed direction and firefighters have contained the blaze near the facility, the group said.
“You’ve still got hotspots in that area, a lot of smoldering stuff”, and trees that might fall because their roots had burned, Judy said.
Despite firefighters’ efforts, the blaze destroyed sets at Sable Ranch in Santa Clarita, which has Old West-style buildings used for movie locations.
The owner told KABC-TV (http://bit.ly/29WRfQC ) he had about $5 million in goods in the warehouse. Air quality officials advised people with respiratory problems to stay indoors.
A Bengal tiger and other exotic animals were evacuated from the Wildlife Waystation, a nonprofit sanctuary for rescued exotic creatures within the national forest. Cal Fire helicopters spent all day flying back and forth between the ocean, where they collected water, and the mountain ridges at the park, where they dropped the water.
As night fell Saturday, Robert Garcia, Fire Chief of the Angeles National Forest said firefighters would continue to fight the flames overnight, using night-flying aircraft to try to build a containment line around it.
Firefighters were forced into defensive mode on one of the fires.
Authorities expanded evacuation orders near a wildfire north of Los Angeles Saturday to include more than 1,000 more homes, after the blaze almost doubled Saturday.
Jerri Masten-Hansen and her husband said she and her husband watched the fire creep in.
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Her sister also left her home down the road. “I grabbed all the pictures of the kids and then I took the paintings of my parents that had been done by a local artist”.
