Blue Cut Wildfires in Southern California Destroy 96 Homes, 213 Other Buildings

CAJON PASS, Calif., Aug. 18 (UPI) – The Blue Cut fire east of Los Angeles continues to scorch more acreage as firefighters struggle to gain control of the explosive blaze, which jumped to almost 36,000 acres on Thursday.

The fire has so far burned more than 12,500 hectares.

More than 82,500 people potentially in Blue Cut’s path are under evacuation orders, including the entire populations of Wrightwood and Lytle Creek, towns of a few thousand people, and most of those in nearby Phelan.

Weather conditions and the dryness of the brush have made the fire unpredictable.

Ryan Velasquez and his family had escaped their home off California 138 in the San Bernardino Mountains, leaving its fate in the hands of the hundreds of firefighters scattered throughout the highways and back roads of the mountains west of Interstate 15.

“Structures are known to have been damaged or destroyed but can not now be assessed due to the extreme fire behavior and growth”, officials said in the InciWeb page. The combination, as seen again this week in San Bernardino County, is explosive, leading to massive forest fires that the Forest Service can ill afford. In Northern California, evacuation orders are beginning to be lifted on the destructive Clayton Fire that authorities believe was started by an arsonist.

In the southern Sierra Nevada, another blaze feeding on dense timber in Sequoia National Forest exploded to almost 15 square miles. Tiny hamlets in Kern and Tulare counties were evacuated.

Stopping – let alone putting out – a fast-moving fire like this is impossible without a serious change in the weather. Pitassi said there still was a possibility of unexpected behavior from the fire since the landscape was so dry from five years of drought.

“There’s lots of fire in this area historically, but even experts are saying this fire is more extreme”, he said.

Where the fire has burned, it hasn’t left much behind that could burn later, good for future fire management, he said.

American firefighters have uncovered extensive damage, while fighting a ferocious wildfire in California.

Last year’s fire season set a record with more than 15,625 square miles of land charred. It was also the costliest on record with $2.1 billion spent to fight fires from Alaska to Florida. Decades of aggressively knocking down small fires also have led to the buildup of flammable fuel.

Flames whipped by strong winds burn though a hillside before destroying camper vans during the Blue Cut Fire in San Bernardino County, California, August 17, 2016. Matthew Porter was in Rio with the medal-winning team when the house burned.