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THOUSANDS OF FIREFIGHTERS battled to contain a blaze tearing through suburban Los Angeles, destroying homes and a popular filming location and threatening actress Tippi Hedren’s animal sanctuary.
The so-called Sand Fire in the Santa Clarita Valley has scorched more than 55 square miles (142 square kilometres) of brush, threatening at least 2,000 properties and forcing an estimated 20,000 residents to flee.
About 10,000 homes have been evacuated since the fire broke out on Friday near Sand Canyon Road in Santa Clarita, according to law enforcement officers.
Around 20 homes have been destroyed, officials said, including two belonging to firefighters.
Police are investigating the death of a badly charred unidentified man, found in a car parked in the driveway of a house in the fire zone.
Around 3,000 firefighters and 26 helicopters have been deployed to tackle the inferno, which blackened the skies over Los Angeles over the weekend. Many roads and highways were partly closed.
Filming location
The ferocious blaze destroyed much of Sable Ranch in Santa Clarita, which has Western-style buildings used for movie locations, owner Hunt told AFP:
We’ve had fires before here and we had always been able to defend it. But this one, this one was a beast. It was a big fire. You could hear it coming. You could hear the ‘fffrrrrrrrr,’ the grumbling and the rumbling.
Hunt’s father and grandfather did the construction work in the 1970s.
The ranch has been the site of various television and film shoots, including 24, The A-Team, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and Maverick.
The only showbiz structure left was a giant metal dinosaur that was going to be used on a Netflix series.
We were able to save it. They couldn’t destroy the beast.
Forest fires are a fact of life in much of California but have become far worse because of bone-dry conditions, with the Golden State gripped in its fifth year of drought.
The Sand Fire has turned out to be one of the worst in this region in decades. It spread fast as it was fueled over the weekend by high temperatures and strong wind.
Melted furniture
Most people have abandoned their homes in Sand Canyon.
Mary and Bill Sloan were out of town in Las Vegas and rushed back when they heard about the fire. Their son was home but he managed to evacuate.
“The fence melted some of our furniture. It had to been thrown into the pool because it caught on fire,” Mary Sloan told AFP.
“I have asthma. I could not breathe. My baby could not breathe. My baby is so sick and kept crying,” said Rehab Moawad, 39, who was at a Red Cross shelter set up at a school with his 14-year-old son Badr.
Hedren’s animal sanctuary, Shambala Preserve, was also forced to move 340 of its more than 400 residents, including Bengal tigers and a mountain lion, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Actress Melanie Griffith, who is Hedren’s daughter, tweeted on Sunday:
Hedren, who founded the sanctuary in the desert community of Acton in 1972, kept a lion in the family home when Griffith was a teenager.
Around five hours later she added:
Meanwhile a wildfire about 300 miles up the coast, outside the Big Sur tourist region, has grown to more than 23 square miles, destroying 20 homes and threatening at least 1,600 more.
In May, fires near Los Angeles pushed 5,000 people out of their homes in the affluent Calabasas area, an LA suburb which is home to many celebrities including members of the Kardashian family.
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If what they UK is planning to do is legal as they claim then surely they should not fear anyone taking a case against it?
Of course we all suspect that its not legally sound.
@Larry O Reilly: Yes, send all those Ukrainians home!
@Kevin Farrell: no one mentioned Ukrainian only you difference in people fleeing a war or economical refugee looking for a free ride
@Larry O Reilly: Exactly – no one mentioned Ukrainians. I guess the difference is they have white skin, whereas the other people fleeing war and persecution have brown or black skin.
The Raj is still alive in Britain.
How bloody dare do those lawyers check if it’s legal! Outrageous!
Typical Johnson nothing but a bully
The Raj is still alive in Britain.
The Raj is still alive in Britain.
@Don Hogan: heard u first time
@Don Hogan: It’s naff all to do with “the Raj”. Britain has had enough of these illegal migrants. The French appear to encourage their passage across the water. None of them can possibly be genuine refugees, otherwise they would have stayed in the first safe country to the one they have fled from.
There are about 67 million people living on mainland Britain. There is barely 6 million here.
Where is the UK supposed to house all these people? The UK has a housing crisis as does this country. Imagine thousands of migrants landing on the shores of Ireland, week in week out!
@Ally Collyer: So basically you want Mediterranean countries like Greece and Italy to be a buffer between the Middle East/Africa and Britain? You do realise that puts a tremendous strain on said Med nations to have to manage all refugees fleeing whatever disaster/persecution in their home countries. Why shouldn’t the Brits have to do their part, just because of geography? They took more than their fair share from most of the world’s nations when they had an empire, and left them in worse shape because of it.
@Ally Collyer: That’s a terrible way to treat Ukrainian’s fleeing the war. And just because they didn’t stay in the first safe country the arrived in after leaving Ukraine!
@Ally Collyer: For arguments sake, let’s consider them as economic migrants, not refugees. Migrants have a net economic benefit for industrialised economies by boosting the working age population and pay more in taxes than they recieve in benefits (OECD). Housing crises are caused by not building enough housing. I suspect the main reason they don’t want them is that they’re foreign, which I understand, as none of us like change.
@Kevin Farrell: ah, no one took you bait, nobody talking about Ukrainians with the exception of you,shows your leave of intelligence
@Larry O Reilly: Ah yes, exactly, nobody talking about Ukrainians. Because they have white skin. @Ally Collyer stated:
“None of them can possibly be genuine refugees, otherwise they would have stayed in the first safe country to the one they have fled from.”
Well, Ukrainians fleeing the war in their country didn’t stay in the “first safe country to the one they have fled from” did they? So, by @Ally Collyer definition they can’t be genuine refugees… or does that only apply to people with brown or black skin?
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