California wildfires: teams battle flames on outskirts of Los Angeles

Emergency empties 770 homes in foothill city of Duarte, while blaze near San Diego continues to pose threat but Santa Barbara mountain fire is pegged back

Wildfires have forced new evacuations of hundreds of homes in California, with firefighters beating back blazes looming over suburban Los Angeles.

A converted DC-10 Air Tanker drops fire retardant along a ridge in the San Gabriel mountains near Los Angeles.

In the LA area firefighters late on Tuesday said they had stopped the progress of two adjacent fires in the San Gabriel mountains 20 miles north-east of downtown.
The blazes were 10 percent contained and had burned about seven and a half square miles, said US Forest Service spokesman Nathan Judy said.

No one was being allowed back to the 770 homes in the foothill city of Duarte that were under evacuation orders.

“We’re looking at another night at least,” Judy said. “We understand the stress it puts on families if you displace them from their homes, and we want to get them back as soon as we can.”

The two fires erupted separately Monday and scared homeowners before burning mostly away from the cities.

Near the US-Mexico border south-east of San Diego, a two-day-old, nine square mile wildfire moved towards a new community and forced the evacuation of about 600 homes and more than 1,500 people in Lake Morena Village. Previously only about 75 people had evacuated from that fire. It was 10% contained.

Horses are led away from the fire in the San Gabriel mountains.

Two towering columns of smoke rose from the mountain range, reminiscent of a 2009 fire that scorched 250 square miles of the Angeles national forest as it burned for weeks.

Elsewhere crews made progress against a week-old blaze in rugged coastal mountains west of Santa Barbara, boosting containment to 84%.

About 270 homes and other buildings were threatened by the blaze. Authorities planned to begin lifting mandatory evacuations on Wednesday.

In Utah officials evacuated people from about 100 homes in the south-west section of the state as a wildfire moved down a rocky slope towards the community of Pine Valley. The blaze was less than a square mile but moving dangerously close to homes in difficult terrain, officials said.

Other blazes were burning in Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, where firefighters also faced blistering heat.


guardian