LOS ANGELES: California firefighters on Sunday struggled to contain a wildfire that killed at least two people and destroyed some 150 homes as it raced over drought-parched land whipped up by strong wind.
The blaze, known as the Erskine Fire, is raging in an agricultural and oil region of south-central California.
The blaze has spread to nearly 37,000 acres (15,000 hectares), the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL Fire) said.
Some 1,700 personnel have been assigned to battle the wildfire, which is just 10 percent contained, CAL Fire said.
At least 75 other homes have fire damage, officials said.
Unusually high temperatures, bone-dry conditions that make brush and grass flammable, and powerful winds gusting up to 80 to 100 kilometers per hour helped spread the flames of a fire that broke out on Thursday afternoon in the sparsely populated Lake Isabella area of Kern County.
Deputies from the Kern County Sheriff’s office said they may have found the remains of a third person killed by the fire in the victim’s mobile home in the Lake Isabella area.
“We’ve located what we believe are human remains,” sheriff’s spokesman Ray Pruitt told reporters on Saturday. “We are treating it like a crime scene.” Pruitt said the remains were “pretty badly burned.”
The cause of the fire is still unknown, but if investigators determine that it was intentionally set then the fire deaths will be treated as homicides, Pruitt said.
