Wildfires north of Los Angeles burn down hundreds of homes
Hundreds flee as wildfires burn down houses north of Los Angeles
Los Angeles: Wildfires north of Los Angeles destroyed thousands of acres and hundreds of homes in the second-largest US city and threatening its power supply.
More than 10,000 people were ordered to evacuate as a fire that exploded overnight in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest, north of Los Angeles.
A separate fire flared southeast of Los Angeles in Orange and Riverside counties on Saturday morning, destroying at least 10 structures.
"We're at the mercy of the wind. Mother Nature's not been too good to us for the last 15 hours," said Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Firefighters also continued to battle the two-day-old blaze in the celebrity enclave of Montecito, near Santa Barbara, where 111 homes have been destroyed.
"When you walk around the areas that were devastated, it looked like hell today," California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger told a news conference.
The greatest damage was reported in the Oakridge Mobile Home Park in the northern San Fernando Valley area of Sylmar, Los Angeles, where the fire burned about 500 houses to the ground.
About 300 people, many of them Oakridge residents who fled their homes during the night, gathered in the Sylmar High School.
The Los Angeles area remains on alert for more fires, said Daniel Berlant, a spokesman at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
