LOS ANGELES -- A lack of firefighting resources in the hours after it was sparked allowed a fast-moving wildfire to make an unprecedented run through Southern California mountains and eventually find fuel in old-growth trees to become one of Los Angeles County's largest fires ever, an official said Tuesday.
The Bobcat Fire has burned for more than two weeks and was still threatening more than 1,000 homes after scorching its way through brush and timber down into the Mojave Desert. It's one of dozens of other major blazes across the West.
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"This is a stubborn fire," Angeles National Forest spokesman Andrew Mitchell said. Only about 100 firefighters were initially dispatched on Sept. 6 when the Bobcat Fire started and swiftly grew to about 200 acres, he said.
"To put that into perspective, normally for a fire that size we'd have at least double or triple that number of firefighters," Mitchell said. At the time, many Southern California ground crews and a fleet of fire-retardant- and water-dropping aircraft were assigned to multiple record-breaking blazes in the northern part of the state.
By the time staffing was ramped up, flames had found their way deep into inaccessible forest. Embers floated across mountain ridges, igniting towering trees and creating an expanding wall of fire.
"A lot of that old growth hadn't seen fire in 40 or 50 years. The fire had a lot of places to go," Mitchell said. The blaze had more than doubled in size over the past week to 170 square miles.
As of Monday, the fire was still advancing at 1 to 2 mph at times and threatened the desert town of Pearblossom, Calif., after burning into the Antelope Valley foothill area, across the San Gabriel Mountains from Los Angeles.
The blaze has destroyed or damaged at least 29 homes and other buildings, with the toll rising to perhaps 85 when damage assessment teams can complete their work this week, authorities said.
Cheryl Poindexter lost her desert home.
"That fire came over the hill so hard and fast that I turned around, and I barely got my eight dogs and my two parrots out," Poindexter told ABC7. "You can see everything is ash."
Firefighters also battled flareups near Mount Wilson, which overlooks greater Los Angeles and has a historic observatory founded more than a century ago and numerous broadcast antennas that serve Southern California.
The fire was pushed by erratic winds over the weekend, although they had died down by Monday and were expected to remain light through Tuesday.
Near Mount Wilson, firefighters set more than a mile (1.6 kilometers) of fires designed to burn out the blaze's fuel and act as a brake on its advance.
"We've got a fire here that is bigger than the city of Denver, and it did it in two weeks," said Sky Cornell with the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
About 1,100 homes and some 4,000 residents remained under evacuation orders, and the fire was only 17% contained, fire officials said.
Evacuation warnings -- meaning residents should be prepared to flee if ordered -- remained in effect for the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena, home of the Rose Bowl and the annual Rose Parade, and Wrightwood, a mountain community near several San Bernardino County ski resorts.
The blaze was one of more than two dozen major wildfires burning across California, including five of the largest in state history.
Twenty-six people have been killed. Officials were investigating the death of a firefighter at another Southern California wildfire that started earlier this month from a smoke-generating pyrotechnic device used by a couple to reveal their baby's gender.
Charles Morton, 39, died on Sept. 17 while battling the El Dorado Fire in San Bernardino National Forest about 75 miles east of Los Angeles.
Morton, was a 14-year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service and a squad boss with the Big Bear Interagency Hotshot Crew of the San Bernardino National Forest.
"Charlie is survived by his wife and daughter, his parents, two brothers, cousins, and friends. He's loved and will be missed. May he rest easy in heaven with his baby boy," Morton's family said in a statement.
