Reuters. Firefighters battled yet another fire in Los Angeles that broke out late Wednesday night (January 22).
The Sepulveda brush fire was burning near the city's affluent Bel-Air neighborhood near the 405 freeway in the Sepulveda Pass.
Aerial images showed multiple fire engines on scene as firefighters attempted to hose down the fire. Helicopters criss-crossed the giant blaze to drop water on the raging flames which could be seen from miles away. The Los Angeles fire department has issued an evacuation warning, news outlets reported.
A new wildfire that broke out north of Los Angeles on Wednesday (January 22) rapidly spread to more than 9,400 acres (38 square km), fueled by strong winds and dry brush, forcing mandatory evacuation orders for more than 31,000 people.
The Hughes fire about 50 miles (80 km) north of Los Angeles further taxed firefighters in the region who have managed to bring two major fires in the metropolitan area largely under control. In just a few hours on Wednesday the new fire grew to two-thirds the size of the Eaton Fire, one of the two monster conflagrations that have ravaged the Los Angeles area.
Officials warned people in the Castaic Lake area of Los Angeles County that they faced "immediate threat to life," while much of Southern California remained under a red-flag warning for extreme fire risk due to strong, dry winds.
Some 31,000 people were under mandatory evacuation orders and another 23,000 face evacuation warnings, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna told a press conference.
On site near Castaic Lake, Publick Information Officer Matthew van Hagen told Reuters "Our hopes tonight are that we are able to make further progress on the fire. Hopefully, the winds will subside. Our relative humidity will increase giving us the upper hand on the fire. Typically, this is when we make the most progress on the fire, allowing us to go into the next operational period ahead of where we started."
The Angeles National Forest said its entire 700,000-acre (2,800-sq-km) park in the San Gabriel Mountains was closed to visitors.
