2 dead, homes destroyed in S. California
Victims were found dead in burned vehicle in Malibu
MALIBU, Calif. — Two people were found dead as a pair of wildfires stretched from inland canyons to the Pacific in Southern California on Saturday, leaving people sifting through the remains of both mansions and modest homes for anything they had left.
The two bodies were found severely burned inside a car on a long residential driveway in Malibu, Los Angeles County sheriff’s Chief John Benedict said. The home is on a winding stretch of Mulholland Highway with steep panoramic views, where on Saturday the roadway was littered with rocks, a few big boulders and fallen power lines, some of them still on fire. Most of the surrounding structures were leveled.
The deaths brings to 25 the number of people killed in the state’s wildfires in the past few days, with 23 found dead in a Northern California wildfire.
Firefighters have saved thousands of homes despite working in “extreme, tough fire conditions that they said they have never seen in their life,” Los Angeles
County Fire Chief Daryl Osby said.
Those vicious conditions on Friday night gave way to calm Saturday, with winds reduced to breezes. No new growth was reported on the larger of the two fires, which stands at 109 square miles, and firefighters now have it 5 percent contained.
Progress also came against the smaller fire, prompting Ventura County officials to allow people in a handful of communities to return to their homes.
Hundreds of thousands across the region remain under evacuation orders and could stay that way for days as winds pick up again.
Osby said losses to homes
were significant but did not say how many had burned. Officials said earlier that 150 houses had been destroyed and the number would rise.
Fire burned in famously ritzy coastal spots like Malibu, where Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian West, Guillermo del Toro and Martin Sheen were among those forced out of their homes amid a citywide evacuation.
The flames also burned inland through hills and canyons dotted with modest homes, reached into the corner of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, and stretched into suburbs like Thousand Oaks, a city of 130,000 people that just a few days ago saw 12 people
killed in a mass shooting at a country music bar.
Wildfire raged in the city still in mourning, where about three-quarters of the population are under evacuation orders that officials urged them to heed. “We’ve had a lot of tragedy in our community,” said Ventura County Supervisor Linda Parks. “We don’t want any more. We do not want any more lives lost.”
Nothing was left but the horses for Arik Fultz, who spent Saturday sifting through the charred remains of his 40-acre ranch near Malibu.
Two houses, two barns, three trailers and decades of accumulated possessions are gone. “It just doesn’t feel real that it’s all gone,” Fultz said. “Just yesterday, what, 24 hours ago I was feeding horses in the morning.”
All 52 horses survived, after a wild scramble to save them.