Southern California hit by 3 separate fires amid ongoing heatwave

Published: Sep 09, 2024 Duration: 00:09:37 Category: News & Politics

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County. Mandatory evacuation orders now Now in place for for resi residents of the Robinson Robinson Ranch Ranh community, which is near Trabuco Canyon. Evacuation warnings have been issued for residents in nearby Rancho Santa margarita. The airport fire exploded from about seven acres at 130. This afternoon to an estimated 1900 acres right now. The OC Fire Authority is using all of its resources. Helicopters and fixed wing aircraft strike teams and hand crews to battle this fast moving fire right now. No word yet on the cause of that fire. Joining us live on the phone is Steve Concialdi, who is with the OC Fire Authority. He's one of their captains. Thank you for the work that you do. Can you give us an update on where you're at and what are you most concerned about at this hour? Right now I'm reporting good news. The fire is burning away from the Robinson Ranch community. It's burning up the hill. So it started around the RC model aircraft airport area in Trabuco Canyon, somewhere in that general area. And the good thing it's burning uphill away from Robinson Ranch. So there was an evacuation order in the Robinson Ranch area, and a lot of the residents did leave there is gridlock in the area right around there. So if you have left, you will not be able to get back to your house for a while. But just know your homes are safe. There's no homes in imminent danger right now. We sent a robust response from helicopters as well as very large aircraft that dropped numerous retardant and water on these fires, including our new Fire Hawk helicopter that could drop a thousand gallons of water. So we have our regular helicopter that drops about 350, but our new fire hawks that we just got, so triple the amount of water that we could drop right then. So again, the airport fire started just after 1:00. We did have one person that suffered some smoke inhalation, but as you can hear, the helicopters keep flying over, keep dropping water, and they're keeping this as well as numerous firefighters on the ground from our firefighters on engine companies to our hand crews, firefighters. And they've kept this fire out of all the homes. Incredible work on behalf of the OC Fire Authority. We'd love to hear about the Fire Hawk being able to drop 1000 gallons an hour. That has to be just a huge help. Of course, this is all under the backdrop of the excessive heat that we have been under fire. Captain, talk about the conditions that your crews are facing right now. Well, let me go back to that fire talk. It could drop a thousand gallons in one drop, and then it quickly, within minutes, can go back and snorkel from a local resident, a reservoir and pull another thousand gallons and then drop it a few minutes later. So it is amazing at how much water that could drop. But again, it's a hot you know, it was 100 degrees out here today. It's dry. And but again, this is a good example for all of us that we need to harden our homes and prep our homes and make sure we don't have any combustible materials, any vegetation, any bushes, wood piles, anything next to our homes or windows. Because when we have the Santa Ana winds, which will be blowing later in the season, and we have the wind shift a different way. If this if this fire was during a Santa Ana wind condition, the fire would have blown back towards different communities. So we're very fortunate that again, let's let's take heed to this and make sure when we do have those Santa Ana winds that we harden our homes so we don't have any structures that are damaged or destroyed. Good reminder from Captain Steve Concialdi from the OC Fire Authority. Thank you very much. Best of luck in the fire fight in the hours ahead. Thank you. And we do have our editor, Laskas heading to the airport fire. You can look forward to that coverage tonight on the Fox 11 news at ten. In the meantime, we will welcome you to the Fox 11 News at Five. We are simulcast on our sister station, Fox 11. Plus, I'm Marla Tellez, Christine Devine is on assignment. I'm Alex Michaelson. We are tracking three major fires in three different counties. There's the bridge fire burning in the Angeles National Forest, the Lion Fire in San Bernardino County, and then the airport fire, the one we just told you about in Orange County. All of these fires being fueled by those hot and dangerous conditions. We do have team coverage on the heat and fire danger. Our new chief meteorologist, Adam Krueger, is tracking when we will see some of that relief. Hal Eisner is following power outages during this heat wave, and Laura Diaz is live at the Lion Fire. And let's start with the fourth day of the Lion Fire. Cal fire reporting nearly 24,000 acres burned. Containment at just 3%. An estimated 11,000 people under evacuation orders. Laura, live for us in the San Bernardino National Forest. Laura Yes, Alex. That wildfire is still burning out of control as we speak to you. Live right here on Fox 11. If you look over my shoulder, you can see it burning on the ridge behind me. And I can tell you this, that they expanded the evacuation order earlier today. We can go in a moment's notice. Scott Swift lives on Sugar Pine Circle in Angeles Oaks. He and his wife are no strangers to fires Monday. Angelus Oaks was one of the many communities in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains. Ordered to evacuate as uncontrolled wildfire continues to burn. 11,000 people told to pack up. The sheriff came down earlier and said, hey, it's mandatory now. And I said, yeah, we'll keep an eye on it. You know, we got the trailer already packed up and all the papers and everything in there and all the pictures and stuff as we talked, a mix of rain and ash fell down on us. Beds made. Swift showed us his trailer, the comforts of home and irreplaceable items in tow to the house, pinks to the car, the titles up highway 38. There were multiple road closures, emergency personnel at the ready brush was urgently being cleared as smoke choked the sky, making it unhealthy for everybody. We found a crew hard at work strategizing strategies to put a line around the fire where we can, where we can safely engage the crews and try to box everything in keeping it out of the community. So everything's kind of working out, you know, in our favor right now. As of early evening, the line fire putting more than 36,000 homes, businesses and structures at risk. As the fire quadrupled over the weekend, Scott took it in stride. We've been through it before. It's the, you know, the perils of living in the mountains. The weather today was a big factor in that. We didn't have the kind of thunderstorms that we had earlier, which was on the very first day and made conditions very terrible. So things are a bit better today. But as the fire department told me, just moments ago, they're still way long way from being out of the woods. I'm Laura Diaz, reporting live from the line fire. Sending it back to you, Marla and Alex. All right, Laura, thank you. Speaking of being a long way from being out of the woods, 0% containment still on the bridge. Fire which has been burning since yesterday in the Angeles National Forest. Sky Fox over that blaze, which has now consumed more than 1200 acres. An evacuation order in effect for East Fork communities of Camp Williams and the River community in Chatsworth. Crews have contained a smaller brush fire that started near Chatsworth Park North this afternoon. The L.A. fire Department says they initially stopped forward progress, but a sudden increase in the wind caused embers to jump their containment lines. Crews are finally able to contain it at ten acres. It's a big day around here. For the first time ever, we get to welcome our new chief meteorologist, Adam Kruger. We will talk more with you about you in a moment. But first, let's talk about the big news. The weather. Welcome. Yeah, well, great to be here. And. Yeah we'll talk more about my journey to get here in a little bit. But let's start with the winds because obviously we've been dealing with these fires. And I want to show you that we don't have any wind advisories right now. It's not like this is an extreme wind situation, but we do at least have double digit wind speeds around the area, and it is going to be a little breezy in some spots over these next couple of days. We'll get more into that a little later on. Let's start with the heat alerts though, because yes, again today we see these excessive heat warnings. That's the magenta color over a large part of our area. And coming into today, we were thinking today was going to be the last day of excessive heat warnings. Well the National Weather Service has extended that into tomorrow, not along the coast, but much of the LA area and inland, again in an excessive heat warning for tomorrow. So on our headlines, well, we will see finally some improving weather as far as these temperatures go. That heat wave gradually backing down. It is still going to be warm tomorrow. It's going to cool down, but still there's that excessive heat warning and it will be much cooler by the time we get into the end of the week. How about those temperatures out there right now? Hot, yes, but not as extreme as we've seen over the last couple of days. But we still see some triple digits up towards Burbank right now it's 104, Santa Clarita at 103. We've got more of those triple digits as we span across the area, all the way over towards San Bernardino, 106, Riverside 103 right now. So we have the heat, high temperatures tomorrow. They're coming down around 5 to 10 degrees. And normally when we see a cool down to that magnitude, well those warnings come to an end. But this speaks to just how extreme this heat wave has been. The fact that we're cooling down about ten degrees and still we have some excessive heat warnings in effect for tomorrow. So we're going to see a mix of some 70s along the coast, 80s and 90s,

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