Raging wildfire forces thousands from Southern California homes
LOS ANGELES — A wildfire raged out of control along the northern edge of Los Angeles early Friday, forcing thousands of people from their homes as firefighters battled flames from the air and on the ground.
The blaze erupted late Thursday along the northern tier of the San Fernando Valley as powerful Santa Ana winds swept Southern California, fanning several destructive blazes.
The Los Angeles Fire Department said the fire had grown to more than 6 square miles before dawn and an estimated 12,700 homes were under evacuation orders.
Helicopters made repeated water drops as crews on the ground attacked flames in and around homes.
No early estimates
The Fire Department said homes were destroyed but did not have an estimate.
Evacuations were also still in effect in the inland region east of Los Angeles where a fire erupted Thursday and raged through a mobile home park in the Calimesa area of Riverside County.
Seventy-four buildings were destroyed, others were damaged and Riverside County authorities were trying to determine if anyone was missing.
Two deaths
A second death has been confirmed at the scene of wildfires in Southern California.
Cal Fire spokeswoman Cathey Mattingly says a person was killed at a mobile home park fire Thursday in Riverside County about 75 miles east of Los Angeles. Mattingly says there were also some injuries but she does not know the number or severity.
Seventy-four structures were destroyed.
In Los Angeles, a man went into cardiac arrest and died at the scene of a raging wildfire that broke out late Thursday.
Smoldering load dropped
The Calimesa fire erupted when the driver of a commercial trash truck dumped a smoldering load to prevent the vehicle from catching fire.
Dry grass quickly ignited and winds gusting to 50 mph blew the fire into the Villa Calimesa Mobile Home Park about 75 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. The park has 110 home sites and was built in 1958, according to its website.
About 160 students sheltered in place as smoke enveloped nearby Mesa View Middle School before buses arrived and evacuated them to another school outside the fire zone.
Fire officials were investigating what caused the trash in the truck to catch fire in Calimesa.
Linda Klosek, 70, and her daughter Stacey Holloway, 43, had gone grocery shopping and were on their way back home to Villa Calimesa when they saw their neighbors evacuating.
“You couldn’t even see anything, the smoke was so thick,” said Linda.
From the evacuation center they watched on TV as flames destroyed their home.
“When you’re watching it, it’s like someone else’s home,” Stacey said. They returned $60 worth of groceries to the store because now “there’s no place to put it.”
Power cut to 20K
Southern California Edison turned off electricity to about 20,000 people in Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino and Kern counties but warned that thousands more could lose service as Santa Ana winds gained strength.
Winds gusted dangerously as forecast before calming in Northern California, where Pacific Gas & Electric faced hostility and second-guessing over its widespread shut-offs
In Northern California, a brush fire sparked Thursday morning in the San Bruno Mountains south of San Francisco, prompting voluntary evacuations. No homes burned.
426K in north have power restored
The lights were back on Friday for more than half of the 2 million Northern California residents who lost electricity after the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. utility switched it off to prevent its equipment from sparking wildfires during dry, windy weather.
PG&E restored the power in Northern California after workers inspected power lines to make sure it was safe to do so. The winds had increased the possibility of transmission lines toppling to the ground and starting wildfires.
The utility said 426,000 Northern California businesses got their power back — but that 312,000 customers were still in the dark. About half of those who lost power in the San Francisco Bay Area had it again on Friday. The city itself was not subject to the preventive outages. Experts have said there are between two and three people for every electrical customer.
Some people in the largely rural Butte, Plumas and Yuba counties on Friday were in their third day without electricity. Butte County is where a fire started by PG&E equipment last year decimated the town of Paradise and killed 85 people.