Evacuation orders were issued for more than 31,000 people living in areas around the lake, located about 50 kilometers north of Los Angeles and near the city of Santa Clarita.
“I pray our house doesn’t burn down,” one man told KTLA television station as he loaded up his car.
On the job, firefighters are fighting in very difficult conditions, said Brent Pascua of the state Cal Fire agency. Between the “winds”, the “low humidity” and the dry “brush” of the region, “all these factors combined make the fire spread very quickly”, explained this firefighter.
Four prisons under threat
Near the lake, four prisons housing a total of 4,700 people are threatened by the fire. One of them was evacuated and its 500 inmates were transferred to another structure, explained Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna.
Inmates from other prisons are being held there for the moment, but buses have been dispatched to evacuate them if necessary, he added on the KCAL9 channel.
The flames caused the closure of several roads and a section of highway in the region.
-Los Angeles bears the scars (and trauma) of the latest fires
The winds are expected to strengthen in the evening and the authorities are not hiding their concerns, at a time when Los Angeles is barely recovering from fires which broke out in early January and disfigured part of the city, killing nearly thirty of people.
Robert Jensen, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s spokesman, pleaded with residents to learn lessons from the recent fires, noting the “devastation” suffered by those who ignored authorities’ warnings. “I don’t want to see that here. If you have received an evacuation order, evacuate.”
The Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, assured that he was “monitoring the situation closely”, after having dispatched resources to the site.
Southern California has not received significant rain in eight months, drying out vegetation and turning the region into a tinderbox, even in the middle of January, the depths of winter. “It’s the fire that worries me the most” since the two main outbreaks that ravaged Los Angeles and its surroundings, explained Daniel Swain, specialist in extreme events at UCLA University. Multiple fires have broken out in the region over the past three weeks, but they have often been contained quickly. According to him, it “has the potential to become very large,” especially if it reaches Ventura County, where the dried vegetation is “very dense.”
