An estimated 34,500 homes and almost 83,000 people have been placed under evacuation orders, and numerous public schools have been closed as a precaution, fire officials said. She doesn’t know when she can return or whether her house was still standing.
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Authorities are urging people to evacuate from more than 34,000 homes, but fear that up to half of them have not heeded their advice, a US Forest Service spokeswoman said. The weather at the time was hot, dry and windy – conditions not expected to begin easing until late Thursday or Friday. Park Williams, a bio-climatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, attributes the danger of the fires to climate change, saying that the “increases in fire activity that we’ve seen over the past several decades” have been caused by global warming.
It was “a unsafe combination of hot weather, bone-dry conditions and breezy winds” that allowed these fires to advance and spread, reports The Washington Post.
The “Blue Cut Fire”, which erupted on Tuesday in the mountainous Cajon Pass northeast of Los Angeles, had exploded to cover 34,500 acres (nearly 14,000 hectares) by early Thursday, growing almost 10,000 acres (4,000 hectares) overnight, fire officials said.
The fire command assembled a fleet of 10 air tankers, 17 helicopters, 178 engines, 26 crews, 17 helicopters and an army of over 1,500 firefighters, many of them just off the lines of a wildfire that burned for 10 days just to the east. In Northern California, evacuation orders are beginning to be lifted on the destructive Clayton Fire that authorities believe was started by an arsonist.
It erupted on Tuesday in the Cajon Pass near Interstate 15, the primary traffic route between greater Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Nevada, to the northeast and quickly devoured canyons and hillsides filled with dense, drought-parched brush and chaparral.
With California suffering from five straight years of extreme drought, everyone in high risk areas are being warned devastating fires could strike anywhere anytime.
“It burns that much quicker, that much hotter”.
“I’m trying to remain optimistic”, Brady said as he sat outside a shelter for evacuees in Fontana.
Residents in Lower Lake and surrounding communities are still recovering from California’s third-most-destructive wildfire previous year, which burned 120 square miles and cost more than $1.5 billion in damages. It was also the costliest on record with $2.1 billion spent to fight fires from Alaska to Florida. On top of that, more people are moving into fire-prone regions, complicating firefighting efforts. It forced thousands from their homes in the Cajon Pass- a mountain pass between the San Bernardino Mountains and the San Gabriel Mountains.
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Before the Blue Cut Fire, 8,000 firefighters had already been battling eight large wildfires across the state. Matthew Porter was in Rio with the medal-winning team when the house burned.
