Southern California brush fire burns dangerously close to homes

[00:00:00]water dropping helicopter that our firefighters have in the fleet. So hopefully, you know, we get uh some really really effective drops here. They can even do multiple drops if they want, either one large one or or two smaller ones. So they're focusing more kind of in the flat land where they can prevent it from spreading to these other ridge lines. So yeah, I mean there's so many flanks now this fire to fight that um it's it's tough. There's not just one area to attack. There's there's a lot of different areas that they they have to be focusing on right now.

[00:00:57]Yeah, Susie, Pat, I'm sorry. I might be having some uh comms issues here, but yeah, very very close to homes here. No doubt. I finally got a fire engine here uh in one of the most threatened neighborhoods here, the end of Summer Hill Lane, where this fire has just exploded over the last 20 minutes. what started as maybe like a a 10 by 20 area that we saw burning at the bottom of a canyon here off of a hiking trail. Uh right here, this is very near where the fire began where you're seeing that Firehawk drop uh there on a parking trail off of Pico Canyon Park. Here is the parking lot where people come down and come to hike in this area. And we saw this coming back from the Palmdale fire and it it looked like a fire that could they could have gotten a handle on very very quickly if they could have just if there would have been some way to get some air resources here more quickly with water, but um it was just kind of a a pretty tough response for the firefighters. We saw a couple of hand crews being dropped off at the top of the ridge lines as well. What started so small has blown up quite a bit here in the western Santa Cita Valley and is definitely threatening homes here south of Pico Canyon and west of the old road.

[00:02:07]Pat, Susie, and Mike Yeah, I think this is just a little bit of a flare up here. This trying to just, you know, creeping up the ridge line here and and chewing through this this thick brush. Definitely really really thick fuel here as we uh you can see just how thick all the brush is here uh in this area which it really makes it just so much tougher to get the flames knocked down. But yeah, now that we have like three or four helicopters here, you can see just what a massive difference they've made. That fire line that we saw that the first uh group of fire retardant that came down looks like that's going to have saved Grazia Lane Favaloso here. You see that the the fire was not able to get through the retardant line right there. Uh cut it off in its tracks very very quickly. We have that C130 that's been doing quite a few laps of here trying to determine where they're going to drop at and they may be coming in right now. So, we'll see where they're going to uh try to kind of connect that that fire line there with retardant and hopefully, you know, surround and drown this fire and uh yeah, you know, get everyone a sigh of relief here hopefully soon.

[00:14:57]I have not been able to see them through the smoke. I mean, yeah, they are down there somewhere. That was really really tough how uh where where they got dropped off kind of right in this area and then just just with hand tools to try to to dig out some fire lines as as quickly as possible. So, right there in the thick of it, those those hand crews that were down there, they may have gone to the other side maybe down here as the uh C130 goes right below us here. Um, just wait to see it come and make a turn. And that that's really going to be the turning point, I think, once the uh once the plane comes in and decides where it's going to drop off. Trying to find it. There it is. So, we'll see here. He's he's done a couple of couple of laps around here. Just trying to kind of pinpoint where they're going to be dropping at. Sorry, but got a little bit of the skid there in the way, but um yeah, this is this will this will be huge once he comes in and drops this this load of fire retardant.

[00:16:14]All right, good. They're off us.