Wildfire grows to 20,000 acres as thousands evacuate in Calif.
LOS ANGELES — California’s first major wildfire of the year grew to more than 20,000 acres overnight after destroying one home, forcing thousands more to be evacuated and sending up a plume of smoke so massive that it generated its own winds, authorities said.
The Apple Fire in Riverside County was burning up steep and rugged hillsides as it spread north and east toward the San Gorgonio Wilderness while continuing to threaten homes to the south. The fire had burned at least 20,516 acres and was 0% contained as of 6 a.m. Sunday.
The terrain is characterized by a web of narrow canyons and drainage channels, which “is creating this higher potential for extremely active fire behavior,” said Lisa Cox, fire information officer for the San Bernardino National Forest.
“What we saw yesterday was a perfect example of that,” she said. “So we did see a very large pyrocumulus cloud just kind of mushroom up into the sky that people could see all the way to Los Angeles.
“And what happens is when those really thick fuels start ripping and burning in those canyons, it creates this incredible power. The fire actually — it doesn’t even matter what the wind’s doing at that point — it just creates its own weather.”
The cloud pushes embers down and blows them in all directions, creating the potential for rapid and unpredictable spread, Ms. Cox said.
“The concern with that is that firefighters cannot control what that plume of smoke does,” she said. “Firefighters cannot control when it’s going up in the sky and coming down in all directions.”
Still, Ms. Cox said, they can prepare by making sure evacuations are ordered and putting down retardant and water in anticipation of where the embers might rain down.
Officials were expecting to see similarly extreme fire behavior Sunday. Most of the developed areas being threatened by the fire were along its southern flank, and the fire was expected to grow further in that direction as winds picked up later in the day, Ms. Cox said.
More than 1,300 firefighters were battling the blaze using ground equipment, helicopters and air tankers. Roughly 7,800 residents in over 2,500 households had been ordered to evacuate as of Saturday afternoon, said April Newman, a public information officer with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.