It was zero percent contained as it roared through Malibu.Īt a town hall Sunday evening in Woodland Hills, which straddles the 101 northeast of Malibu, some 350 evacuees packed a high school multipurpose room, many expressing frustration that firefighters couldn’t control the flames. The Woolsey fire took center stage, raging south through the endless suburban sprawl, and jumping the 101 Freeway in several places. But as it entered the 24,000-acre footprint of a major 2013 fire, it had far less fuel to burn. Fourteen miles to the east, the Woolsey fire began on a hillside next to the old Santa Susana Field Lab, a hazardous site in Ventura County contaminated by decades of rocket and nuclear reactor testing and a partial meltdown in 1959.Īt first, the Hill fire was the more worrisome, quickly burning through 140 square miles. The Hill Fire started in the Santa Rosa Valley, a few miles northwest of Thousand Oaks. Stoked by the same hot, dry winds-called Santa Anas in Southern California-they spread. Thursday, as the Camp Fire continued to rage uncontrolled in and around Paradise, two brush fires broke out 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles. By then, Northern California has usually had enough rain and snow to prevent fires, and their firefighters are available to help out down south. Southern California’s Santa Ana fire season starts in late September. As he drove around in search of safe exit routes, he came upon an elderly woman in a wheelchair alone on an empty section of road, pushing herself through the maelstrom. He thinks it was around 9 o’clock, though he can’t remember for sure, that smoke filled the sky and turned the morning dark as night. Everywhere, there were flames, smoke, and wreckage. Wrecked and abandoned cars blocked the roadway, said McLean. “Hell,” was the only word he had for it on Sunday. McLean is a 21-year veteran of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection-and Cal Fire’s chief spokesperson since 2014-but he was still stunned by what he saw. as the fire was already engulfing the southern side of town. Scott McLean arrived in Paradise around 8 a.m. It was as if “the gates of hell had opened up.” “Black and red was all you could see.” Survivors describe the scene of horror in biblical terms. They drove through fire and smoke too thick to see through, colliding with other cars and driving off embankments. In Paradise, some residents awoke to the sound of embers raining down on their rooftops. As it flows downhill, the air gets hotter and dryer. Winds forced through narrow gaps in California’s north-south running mountains and down steep canyons move even faster, like water in a narrowing riverbed. Cooler, high pressure air over Nevada and Utah flows toward the warmer, lower pressure air on the coast, and that creates the wind. Winds like that are not abnormal for fall and winter in California, Shoemaker said, when the Great Basin desert is cooler than the California coast. The winds would peak at 60-70 mph that day, whisking the swelling flames down the Feather River canyon toward the small towns at its base. It’s like a matchbox.”Īt the site of the fire early that morning, firefighters reported 35 mph winds. Shoemaker said that he’s never seen November so dry. Hardly any rain had come, and the vegetation was as dry as it normally would be at the height of summer. October 1 is the official beginning of the wet season. In the past, autumn rains would have ended Northern California’s fire season more than a month before the Camp Fire started, said meteorologist Craig Shoemaker of the National Weather Service in Sacramento. It’s good for agriculture, but dry summers make for prime wildfire conditions. When the first firefighters arrived at the site at 6:43 a.m., they knew they were seeing the beginning of a potential conflagration.Ĭalifornia’s Mediterranean climate makes for two seasons: a long dry summer and a mild, wet winter. Burning vegetation had been reported beneath PG&E’s high-tension power lines near the Poe dam. on November 8, firefighters were dispatched to the North Fork of the Feather River in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
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