“This fire is really bad”

Nothing is left of his house. Keyon, 16, held up his smartphone, which showed a pile of burnt matches. On Friday, September 13, he sat in the middle of an exhibition center converted into an emergency shelter by the Red Cross in Pomona in the greater Los Angeles area and described the sudden change in mood before the fire arrived in Wrightwood, the village of 4,400 residents in the northeast of the Californian city where he grew up: “The sky was red and I almost turned black from the smoke, but we thought the fire was still very far away. And then the police came with megaphones and said: 'You have to evacuate.'”

Like thousands of other residents of this mountainous region, Keyon and his family left everything behind within seconds on Tuesday when the Bridge Fire, which had broken out two days earlier, suddenly doubled in size, driven by wind speeds of over 80 km/h and temperatures of over 40 °C. On Tuesday, a plume of smoke was visible from downtown Los Angeles into the heart of the city.

Within days, three major wildfires broke out within 100 kilometers of a city already suffering from the heat wave. After two relatively mild summers, Los Angeles experienced the resurgence of a danger that had been quickly forgotten. On local radio station LAist, experts advised residents living near the fires to get their pandemic masks out of the closet. And images of a chairlift threatened by flames at the small ski resort Mountain High, one of the closest to Los Angeles, were shown continuously on local TV channels and social media.

Maximum mobilization

The Bridge Fire, whose cause is currently unknown, is the most worrying fire among authorities. In less than a week, it has burned over 210 square kilometers alone. “To give you an idea, the city of Long Beach is 21,000 hectares, so this fire is bigger than the city in terms of area covered,” says Kenichi Haskett, a Los Angeles County firefighter in charge of communications for the Bridge Fire. Long Beach borders Los Angeles, which has a population of over 450,000.

Since Wednesday, temperatures that have dropped below 30 degrees Celsius and overnight humidity have helped firefighters contain the spread of the fire. However, at the camp that firefighters have set up as headquarters in Irwindale, in the valley below the Bridge Fire, mobilization was at an all-time high on Friday and only 3% of the fire was considered under control.

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