“We’re just trying to get shelter. I didn’t even know what to take. I just put everything I could in my car,” she added, on the verge of tears.
Authorities are currently trying to assess the number of homes destroyed. According to local media present on site, there are dozens of them.
“Everything is gone,” said a man with a broken voice on KTLA, who lost his home where he had lived for 27 years.
After two rainy winters which provided a relative respite, California is experiencing a very active fire season this year.
The vegetation reformed thanks to the precipitation of the last two years has dried up and becomes a powerful fuel.
This summer, the “Golden State” suffered from several heat waves, signs of global warming.
In July-August, it suffered the fourth largest fire in its history.
Forest fires: thousands of people evacuated in the face of a vast fire in California
Dry fire hydrants
Ventura County fire officials said they are devoting all their resources to this fire.
Helicopters dropped water on the area throughout the night. Several hundred firefighters defended the houses with fire hoses.
The fight against the flames is so intense that the hydrants to which the fire trucks connect were dried up by demand at one point on Wednesday evening.
“We flushed the water systems,” Ventura County Fire Chief Dustin Gardner said at a news conference Thursday. This forced his teams to carry water to different homes.
Faced with the flames, Dawn Deleon had only a few moments to flee with her six dogs.
“We saw the neighbors’ houses burning and we said it was time to leave,” she told KTLA. “We were gone for five minutes and then we turned around to get my phone and the house was already on fire.”
The flames are driven by the Santa Ana winds, hot, dry gusts from the desert, typical of fall in Southern California.
Local weather services issued an alert this week, warning of the risk of fires.
These winds should gradually lose their strength on Thursday, before “a considerable reduction” in the evening, explained meteorologist Rich Thompson.
Power companies cut power to tens of thousands of customers in the area, a common strategy in California during high winds, to reduce the risk of new fires caused by toppled power lines.
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