Heat Fuels Brush Fires; Corona Blaze Sears Foothills

A brush fire engulfed 440 acres of brush and citrus groves Friday as it spread across foothills south of this Inland Empire city, destroying one home, damaging another and prompting evacuations.

The blaze in an inaccessible canyon was 50% surrounded, and firefighters hoped to fully contain it by evening, said Capt. Tom Ramsey of the California Department of Forestry.

“The weather’s still hot with low humidity,” he said. “We’ll have to see what the afternoon winds do to us.”

The fire erupted about 3:30 p.m. Thursday and quickly spread northward to within a half-mile of Corona, about 40 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Authorities evacuated about 200 homes, said Riverside County fire spokeswoman Becky Luther.

The cause of the blaze had not been determined.

Flames raced down hillsides and into backyards as homeowners watched.

“It’s scary when you’re in the bedroom and you’re looking out the window and all you see are flames,” Peter Fischetti said.

“It’s the scariest feeling in my life,” Elizabeth Arroyo said.

Air tankers and helicopters dropped fire retardant and water on the flames Thursday, but some 340 firefighters resorted to fighting by hand when darkness fell and the aircraft were grounded.

Meantime, a fire that burned 900 to 1,000 acres of brush at California’s sprawling Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base was contained, Marine Capt. Kim Miller said.

The fire was in a weapons-firing area without buildings, Miller said. She had no details on when the blaze started or its cause.

Some of the dozens of wildfires that have scorched more than 115,000 acres in California and Oregon in the last month are burning in remote, nearly inaccessible terrain, so it hasn’t been easy to reach the front lines.

In the Los Padres National Forest, where two lightning-sparked wildfires scorched 69,000 acres of trees and brush last month, they found a very low-tech solution on Thursday: pack mules.

The U.S. Forest Service turned to the Ventana Mounted Assistance Group, volunteer mule-drivers who loaded up 19 mules and led them along seven miles of trails in mountainous areas of Big Sur.

“We were using pack mules because of smoky conditions in the canyon that would slow down the helicopter, and also there’s an area of closed canopy forest, and we didn’t want to cut down trees to land a helicopter,” said Steve Davis, a Forest Service worker.

The mules carried close to 4,000 pounds of batteries, food rations, water, fuel for chain saws and water pumps, and sleeping bags and pads for a crew preparing to make a stand along the Carmel River, Davis said.

In San Diego County, 85 children and 30 adults were evacuated Thursday from a campground north of San Diego near Palomar Mountain, where 1,000 acres of brush burned, said Lora Lowes, a California Department of Forestry spokeswoman.

That fire was 25% contained, with full containment expected Sunday evening, she said.

Another blaze scorched 1,200 acres of brush in remote Jamul in eastern San Diego County, where TV, cellular phone and pager transmission towers were threatened. That fire was 45% contained, Lowes said.