The Coastal Fire began Wednesday afternoon at about 2:45 pm in the Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park and quickly grew to about 200 acres, said Orange County Fire Authority Assistant Chief of Field Operations TJ McGovern. The fire then spread into the city of Laguna Niguel and ripped through mansions along hillside streets in one of California’s richest neighborhoods.
One firefighter was injured and hospitalized, McGovern said. About 900 homes are under evacuation orders, Orange County Sheriff Department Capt. Virgil Asuncion said.
Jennifer McCoy, a resident of nearby Laguna Beach, told CNN she first noticed smoke coming from Laguna Niguel around 4:15 pm Less than two hours later, the smoke clouds had ballooned even larger, McCoy said.
“I walked down to the shopping center below and the smoke grew maybe two to three times what it was before,” she said.
Even so, there was not a particularly high risk of fire on Wednesday, and officials and scientists were taken aback by the speed and intensity of the blaze. Orange County Fire Chief Brian Fennessy said a brush fire like this used to be relatively minor. Not anymore.
“The fuel beds in this county, throughout Southern California, throughout the West, are so dry that a fire like this is going to be more commonplace,” he said.
Despite the efforts of firefighters, the fire still “ran” on first responders, officials said.
“We’ve seeing spread in ways that we have not before,” Fennessy said. “Five years ago, 10 years ago, a fire like that might have grown to an acre, couple acres” before it was under control. But now, “fire is spreading in this very dry vegetation and taking off,” he said.
“We don’t have a fire season. It’s year-round now, and these last four fires that we’ve had just proved it to all of us,” he said.
Laguna Niguel residents ordered to evacuate
Laguna Niguel resident Allan Aguilera told CNN he and his family decided to evacuate when they saw the scope of the flames from a lookout point in the neighborhood.
“When we reached the top we saw the full scale of how big the fire was and witness how quickly it was spreading,” he said. “There were tons of people in the area doing the same, watching the fire before the winds changed and began pushing the flames closer and closer. At that point we decided to leave and go prepare for potential evacuation.”
“The situation was incredibly tense but we kept our cool, gathered our most valuable belongings … and made an early evacuation to avoid any potential bottle necking if the worst case scenario were to play out,” Aguilera added.
Firefighting crews resorted to using water from a pond at the El Niguel Country Club in Laguna Niguel to help fight the flames as thick brown and gray smoke blanketed the area.
Crews were conducting damage assessments overnight and monitoring for hotspots or flying embers that could spark more damaging flames, Fennessy said.
From ‘fire season’ to ‘fire year’
Winter and spring are typically the wet seasons for California, but this year has been anything but – especially in the southern half of the state. Los Angeles and Palm Springs are off to their third- and second-driest start to a year, respectively. Records in this region go back more than 70 years.
Statewide, January to April were the driest first four months on record, the US Drought Monitor reported Thursday. Over the past week alone, extreme drought expanded from 40% of the state to 60%.
“We’ve stopped talking about fire seasons,” Issac Sanchez, Cal Fire’s battalion chief of communications, told CNN. “The implication of that term is if we’re in fire season there’s a time of year when we’re not in fire season. That’s just not the case in California anymore.”
“It’s a result of climate change, it’s a result of the drought we’re seeing,” Sanchez added. “The Coastal Fire is a graphic example that you do not need thousands of acres burned to impact you.”
CNN’s Brandon Miller, Ella Nilsen and Sharif Paget contributed to this report.
