As the sun began to set over Castaic Lake on Wednesday, the hills to the north and east were engulfed in flames, casting an eerie orange glow over the valley below.
The Hughes Fire ignited earlier in the day north of Castaic and had spread to more than 9,000 acres by evening, forcing the evacuation of about 31,000 people.
On Lake Hughes Road, wooden pilings supporting power lines were burned and snapped, and high-voltage wires snaked across the sidewalk.
A bulldozer operator fires a field to set up containment lines at the Hughes Fire near Charlie Canyon Road in Castaic.
(Gina Ferrazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Overhead, two firefighting helicopters circled constantly and hurriedly between the lake and the burning hillside. It only took them about a minute to fill the tanks with hoses as they hovered over the water, and then only a few minutes to throw their cargo over the flames and back for more.
To the south of the lake, a large empty field burned and dozens of fire trucks were dousing the remaining embers. Across Ridge Route, a row of apartment buildings a stone’s throw from the flames, residents watched the spectacle like fans at a sporting event — cellphones held aloft, sharing the shocking footage with friends and family via live video. picture.
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Antonio Morataya was at work about 15 minutes away when he heard the field next to his apartment building was on fire.
He ran home, threw his passport and other documents he could find into his car, then stepped outside to watch firefighters battle the flames for an hour.
Thick smoke billowed from a mountain in Castaic and a fire spread on Wednesday.
(Wally Scully/Los Angeles Times)
A few blocks east of Interstate 5, with nothing burning between him and the freeway, he had a decent escape route if conditions worsened — assuming there was no traffic on the road.
He joked about feeling “safe” because there was a small county fire station half a block away, “but the fire was even closer!”
