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“At this moment, thousands of our brother and sister firefighters are putting their lives on the line to protect the lives and property of thousands,” said Brian Rice, the president of the California Professional Firefighters, which represents more than 30,000 firefighters and paramedics. “Some of them are doing so even as their own homes lay in ruins.”
Nearly 60 percent of California’s 33 million acres of forestland are owned by the federal government, according to a 2018 report by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office. An additional 25 percent of the state’s forests are privately owned, and about 14 percent are owned by industrial owners like timber companies. State and local governments own just 3 percent of the state’s forests.
One of two major fires in Southern California, called the Woolsey, has also surged, doubling in size overnight to 70,000 acres and forcing the evacuation of about 250,000 people, according to state officials. It was 0 percent contained as of Saturday morning. Fire crews in Ventura and Los Angeles Counties were fighting on steep, hilly terrain that made controlling the blaze difficult.
“Our firefighters have been experiencing some extreme, tough fire conditions that they said they’ve never seen in their life,” said Daryl Osby, the chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. “We just ended the hottest summer on record. We have fuels that are in critical drought state right now. This is the sixth year of seven years of drought in this region.”
Mr. Osby said that winds were expected to pick up on Sunday and last through Tuesday, further complicating firefighting efforts in the region, and that they currently had no timeline for lifting evacuation orders or opening Highway 101, one of the region’s major thruways.
Scott StJohn, 42, an entrepreneur and fitness company owner, was evacuated from his home in Malibu on Friday morning with his family, believing that “there was no way the fire was going to reach all the way down to the beach.”
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