Fire Scorches 1,000 Acres in Northern L.A. County : Blaze: No one is injured and no structures are damaged. High temperature of 100 at Civic Center ties 95-year record.

As temperatures soared, a fast-moving brush fire engulfed more than 1,000 acres in the rural northern Los Angeles County community of Agua Dulce on Saturday.

No one was injured and no buildings were damaged by the blaze, which for a time threatened a mobile home park and several other structures. A spokesman for the Los Angeles County Fire Department said a downed power line had been found at the site of the fire, but the cause of the blaze has not been determined.

About 350 county and U.S. Forest Service firefighters were needed to contain the blaze as winds in excess of 20 m.p.h. helped spread the flames.

Firefighters kept the blaze from reaching homes in Bee Canyon and a mobile home park after clearing away brush by hand and with bulldozers. Nature played a hand too.

“The winds are kind of squirrelly here,” said Capt. Steve Valenzuela. “They can change in either direction. In this case, they helped us by blowing the other way.”

The fire was 80% contained by 7 p.m., firefighters said.

Dry conditions and stronger-than-expected Santa Ana winds caused the fire to move rapidly and made it difficult to contain, fire officials said.

Strong Santa Ana winds will continue today, which is typical for this time of year, although they will be calmer than they were Saturday, said Kris Farnsworth, a meteorologist at WeatherData Inc.

Saturday’s high temperature at the Civic Center was 100--tying a record set in 1899. The low was 67. Today will be slightly cooler, with a high of 97 and a low of 70.

Authorities were notified of the fire about 10 a.m. Saturday. It started near Agua Dulce Canyon Road, about one mile south of the Antelope Valley Freeway, and headed west toward Santa Clarita.

The freeway was closed from Via Princessa to Red Rover Mine Road for several hours, backing up traffic for miles.

Residents in the brush-covered, sparsely populated canyons handled the crisis calmly, even as the blaze roared down the west side of Agua Dulce Canyon Road.

Richard Kurich saw the fire coming his way and prepared for an exit.

“I had a couple bags packed and had my dog ready to leave,” he said. But the firefighters’ actions reassured him.

“They lit some backfires and when it got down to here, they had all kinds of equipment on it,” Kurich said.

One of the day’s most dramatic incidents involved a county Fire Department bulldozer that crawled up and down the rugged ridges east of the freeway cutting firebreaks.

Operator Steve Oldaker came upon a nearly vertical slope and could not back away from it. For the next 20 minutes, with a rapt audience of Fire Department brass, sheriff’s deputies, camp crews and reporters looking down from the otherwise empty freeway, Oldaker used every trick in the bulldozer’s repertory to ease the giant machine down safely.

First planting the blade into the dirt, he repeatedly lifted the whole tractor into a horizontal position on the blade’s hydraulic arms and then spun the steel tracks to cut dirt away from behind him.

Little by little, the loose dirt filled in under the front of the rig, building a pad from which to launch the next step.

Later, asked how steep a grade the tractor could descend, Oldaker said: “That was too steep.”

Times staff writer Diane Seo contributed to this story.