TRABUCO CANYON, California — Alex Luna, a 20-year-old missionary, watched the sky turn from cherry red to black in about 90 minutes as an explosive wildfire tore toward the Southern California mountain community of Wrightwood, prompting authorities to urge residents to leave their belongings and evacuate the town.
“It was very bad, I would say hellish,” Luna said Tuesday night. “It was just very dark. Not a good place to be at that time. … Ash was falling from the sky like it was snowing.”
Luna was among those who heeded the evacuation order issued for the community of about 4,500 in the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles. The bridge fire is one of three major forest fires fires in Southern California, endangering tens of thousands of homes and other buildings.
The fires broke out during a triple-digit heat wave that finally ended Wednesday, with cooler temperatures bringing the prospect of firefighters finally making progress against the flames.
Other major fires were burning over the Westincluding in Idaho, Oregon and Nevada, where about 20,000 people fled a fire outside Reno.
In Northern California, a fire that started Sunday has burned at least 30 homes and commercial buildings and destroyed 40 to 50 vehicles in Clearlake City, 110 miles (117 kilometers) north of San Francisco. About 4,000 people were forced to evacuate.
California is only in the middle of its wildfire season, but it has already burned nearly three times as much land area as it will in all of 2023.
Evacuation orders were extended Tuesday night in Southern California as fires grew to encompass parts of the popular ski town of Big Bear. About 65,600 homes and buildings were threatened by the Line Fire, including those under mandatory evacuations and those under evacuation warnings, nearly double the number from the previous day.
Residents along the southern edge of Big Bear Lake were told to leave the area, which is a popular destination for fishermen, cyclists and hikers. The fire had burned more than 51 square miles (132 square kilometers) of grass and brush, blanketing the area in a thick cloud of dark smoke.
The sour air caused several districts in the area to close schools through the end of the week due to safety concerns. Three firefighters have been injured since the fire was reported Thursday, state fire managers said.
For Wrightwood, a picturesque town 60 miles east of Los Angeles known for its 1930s cabins, threatening wildfires have become a fact of life. Authorities expressed their frustration in 2016 while only half of the residents responded to the order to leave.
Janice Quick, president of the Wrightwood Chamber of Commerce, lives a few miles outside of town. Late Tuesday afternoon, she was eating lunch outside with friends and they were showered with embers the size of her thumbnail, which fell on the table and made a clanging sound.
One friend texted her to say her house had burned down, while another friend watched through her Ring camera as flames descended on her home.
“I’ve never seen anything like this and I’ve been through fires before,” said Quick, who has lived in Wrightwood for 45 years.
In neighboring Orange County, firefighters used bulldozers, helicopters and planes to battle a fast-moving blaze, the Airport Fire, that began Monday and spread to about 3 square miles (8 square kilometers) in just a few hours. The fire was sparked by a spark from heavy equipment being used by government workers, officials said.
By Tuesday evening, it had burned more than 30 square miles (78 square kilometers) and was moving across mountainous terrain into neighboring Riverside County without any containment, said Capt. Steve Concialdi of the Orange County Fire Authority. It burned several communications towers on one peak, though officials said so far they had no reports of damage disrupting police or fire communications in the area.
Concialdi said the fire was contained outside of homes in Orange County, but there are 36 recreational cabins in the area. He said authorities do not yet know if the cabins were damaged or destroyed by the fire.
Two firefighters who were injured by the heat and a resident who inhaled smoke were treated in hospital and then released.
Sherri Fankhauser, her husband and daughter set up lawn chairs and watched Tuesday as helicopters dropped water on a burning hillside a few hundred yards from their home in Trabuco Canyon.
They were not evacuated, even though their street had been under a mandatory evacuation order since Monday. A neighbor did help Fankhauser’s 89-year-old mother-in-law evacuate, Fankhauser said. The flames died down last night but flared up again in the morning.
“You can see fire coming over the ridge now,” Fankhauser said Tuesday afternoon. “It’s getting a little scarier now.”
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Peipert reported from Denver