MORONGO VALLEY, Calif. — Southern California's wildfire season began in earnest Wednesday as dry, hot conditions and steady winds fanned six separate blazes across the region, the most serious of which destroyed up to nine homes and blackened 4,500 acres of desert 120 miles east of Los Angeles.
Five of the blazes were in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Combined, they threatened more than 700 homes over more than 8,500 acres as fire crews and water-dropping aircraft struggled to contain them.
Stoked by triple-digit temperatures and fueled by dry, dense grasses that sprang up after near-record rainfall last winter, flames reached more than 30 feet high as firefighters ordered evacuations near Big Morongo Canyon Reserve. The wildfire began as a house fire about 1 p.m., and within hours the flames had covered more than 1,000 acres and were "burning in and around" the many ranch homes and horse corrals scattered throughout the rugged Mojave Desert valley, according to the San Bernardino County Fire Department.
The fire, which was burning out of control to the northeast and approaching Yucca Valley on Wednesday evening, left a scorched landscape of charred scrub, smoking palm trees and chimneys jutting up from leveled homes.
"It was like a big inferno on the mountainside," said Morongo Valley resident Lori Weeks, 27. "I've never seen anything like that here."
The five fires in Riverside and San Bernardino counties broke out within half an hour of one another, placing an immediate strain on local firefighting resources.
Two of the fires erupted near the remote Hackberry Mountains in the eastern Mojave Desert. Despite the efforts of federal Bureau of Land Management crews, the two fires converged and spread over more than 2,500 acres. No structures were reported damaged or threatened.
In Bent, near Helendale, a blaze consumed 30 acres of brush, but no structures in a nearby residential area were damaged.
In Riverside County, another wildfire burned near the Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians' reservation, northeast of Hemet. More than 1,000 firefighters, three helicopters, six water-dropping airplanes and six bulldozers attacked the blaze, which had spread to more than 2,000 acres by Wednesday evening. Although the fire burned just several thousand yards from the Soboba Casino, there were no reports of injuries or homes lost, authorities said.
