• Late Wednesday night, officials sent an emergency alert to all of Los Angeles County warning of “extreme fire danger.” Here’s what to do when you’re preparing to evacuate.
• Fire and smoke forced the closing of the 101 freeway — the main coastal route north from Los Angeles — between Ventura and Santa Barbara. Here is our list of road closures in the Los Angeles area.
• Hundreds of schools were ordered closed for the rest of the week because of the thick blanket of smoke filling the skies. The Los Angeles Unified School District said at least 322 schools, including independent charters, would not hold classes on Thursday.
• The National Weather Service, which warned of the risk of “very rapid fire growth,” said winds could diminish Friday into Saturday.
In Ventura, ‘the entire town slept with one eye open.’
Forty miles to the northwest of Los Angeles, the largest of several fires had consumed 96,000 acres by Thursday morning and at least 150 structures — probably hundreds more, fire officials said — and threatened 15,000 others in Ventura County, and was 5 percent contained.
“We’ve always been under threat of fire; we’re used to it,” said Suzanne White, who drove past curtains of flames above the 101 freeway as she fled her home in the mountain-fringed town of Ojai. “But this year, the fires are raging so fast and furiously that you can’t get ahead of them.”
“It burns,” she said, “and it keeps burning.”
Emergency officials said early Thursday that the blaze, known as the Thomas Fire, “continues to burn actively with extreme rates of spread and long-range spotting when pushed by winds.” Part of the region’s 101 freeway was shut down as the fire reached the highway and edged northwest of Ventura.
“The entire town slept with one eye open,” said Tracie Fickenscher, a Ventura resident. “Every time you hear the wind rush up to your house, you wonder if that is the gust. Is that the one that kicked up enough of a spark?”
Officials in Oxnard, in Ventura County, said around midday Thursday that firefighters were battling a grass fire in the city. They said there was no immediate threat to buildings.
Read more from people who were at the front lines of the fires here.
A ‘miraculous result’ in Los Angeles, but warnings of worse to come.
Officials in Los Angeles said conditions were improving on Thursday, but remained precarious in the Bel-Air area, where 475 acres had burned. The fire was only 20 percent contained there and evacuation orders remained in place, though city leaders said a decision on allowing residents back to their homes could be made Thursday afternoon.
“We were promised erratic weather, but luckily the erratic weather was erratic in a good way,” said Mayor Eric M. Garcetti, who warned that wind gusts could still hit 70 miles per hour in the days ahead.
Four structures had been destroyed and 12 more damaged in Bel-Air, which the area’s City Council member, Paul Koretz, called “almost a miraculous result.” The Los Angeles Fire Department planned to use a drone later Thursday to assess damage and search for hot spots.
But officials were reluctant to claim victory, warning that the firefight continued and that conditions remained dangerous.
“We are a long way from being out of this weather event,” said Chief Ken Pimlott of Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency. “In some cases, the worst could be yet to come in terms of the wind.”
In Huntington Beach, where a grass fire was reported earlier Thursday near a commercial area, the local police said on Twitter that water was being dropped from aircraft but that the situation was “under control.” Malibu officials said the fire that broke out in their city on Thursday morning was “currently contained.”
A lack of rain in recent months has raised the danger.
Video4 Reasons California’s Fires Are So Bad This Year
California has suffered unusually destructive fires this year. Here’s why.
By BEN LAFFIN on Publish Date December 6, 2017. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images. Watch in Times Video »From the deck on the roof of his home in Ventura, Tom Sheaffer has spent most of the week watching the fire move from Santa Paula all the way west to the ocean. Mr. Sheaffer, who was born and raised in Ventura, said he had never seen a fire as bad as this.
“This is a whole different level,” he said on Wednesday. “The fuel around here is mostly grass, but it’s dry grass and it really hasn’t burned for many years. The confluence of the hot, dry winds and that fuel that’s been building for so many years has just created this awful situation.”
The strong winds that are driving the fires are a normal feature of late fall and winter in Southern California. What is different this year — and what is making the fires particularly large and destructive — is the amount of bone-dry vegetation that is ready to burn.
“What’s unusual is the fact that fuels are so dry,” said Thomas Rolinski, a senior meteorologist with the United States Forest Service. “Normally by this time of year we would have had enough rainfall to where this wouldn’t be an issue.”
The situation in Southern California is similar to what occurred in Northern California in October, when high, hot winds fueled fires that killed 40 people and destroyed thousands of homes. But while Northern California has since had a lot of rain that has essentially eliminated the fire threat, the south has remained dry.
“We haven’t had any meaningful precipitation since March,” Mr. Rolinski said.
A photo caption with an earlier version of this story misstated the city in which firefighters were working to douse embers. It was Ventura, not Ojai.
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