A major highway near Southern California’s huge wildfire has fully reopened.
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It is 5 percent contained.
A burned home is seen Thursday in the Mormon Rocks area off of Highway 138. By Thursday, he had run out of patience.
“I can’t take the risk”.
“I’m hoping someone is stuck around hiding someplace”, Santore said. But when he reached his home, he found that he was one of the lucky ones.
Velasquez then spent much of the day thanking every firefighter he encountered for a job well done.
“Right now the fire is just too hot in most of these areas”, said U.S. Forest Service spokesman Jake Rodriguez. As flames overtook the pine forests surrounding Wrightwood, only half of the residents in this picturesque mountain town heeded the evacuation orders.
Aerial views showed the mountains covered in plumes of smoke.
Impeded by treacherous terrain, hot, dry, windy weather and the ferocious nature of the blaze itself, almost 1,600 firefighters have so far managed to carve containment lines around just 4 per cent of the fire zone, authorities said.
The cause of the blaze remains under investigation.
Yesterday the fire was 22 per cent contained and a small number of evacuees on the fire’s east side where the containment line was were allowed to return home.
Some roads were reopened. After staying in a hotel with her sister, she arrived at the evacuation center to join her neighbor.
“They just stop by to use the bathroom and get coffee and water”, Lee said.
Before the Blue Cut Fire, 8,000 firefighters had already been battling eight large wildfires across the state.
Not everyone was as generous. The Blue Cut Fire began early Tuesday in the San Bernardino National Forest and quickly grew to more than 25,000 acres in about 24 hours.
On Thursday, three people were arrested on suspicion of looting in the Swarthout Canyon area.
The communities of Lytle Creek, Wrightwood and Phelan are still threatened Friday, authorities said.
“Breathing smoke again, just like a year ago”, Shannon Anderson, a partner in the ranch, said as she panted into the telephone.
It’s the first good news for residents since authorities put more than 34,000 homes and 82,000 people under evacuation warnings in the region 60 miles east of Los Angeles. More than 80,000 people, primarily living in small communities, have been evacuated, according to the Associated Press.
Some residents, however, made a decision to ignore the warnings by authorities and remained in their homes. “There is still fire danger and this fire hasn’t performed like other fires”.
“It burns that much quicker, that much hotter”, Collins said.
Almost 30 major blazes have burned some 530 square miles (1,373 square kms) in eight Western states this week, as prolonged drought and unusually hot weather have intensified wildfire season, the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, said.
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“We had 120 animals by 4 p.m. Tuesday”, he said.
