Wildfire explodes in rural LA County hills

July 30, 2010 | By admin | No Comments »

PALMDALE, Calif. – Firefighters plan an aggressive air attack at first light Friday against a fast-moving wildfire that exploded in northern Los Angeles County, chewing through more than 7 square miles of dry brush, forcing hundreds of evacuations and burning at least three structures.

There is zero containment, authorities said.

Three water-dropping helicopters and hundreds of firefighters worked through the night to get ahead of the blaze which broke out around 3 p.m. Thursday on the northern side of State Route 14. By early evening the winds picked up and pushed the flames north and east toward Palmdale, in the suburbs of Los Angeles County’s inland desert, authorities said.

Orange flames exploded through dry grasses, jumped roads and sped across the rural foothills that connect Los Angeles to the high desert.

“Man, it looks bad outside. If I step outside the restaurant, it’s just insane looking — black and orange smoke and helicopters going through, dropping water,” said Jamie Karschamroon, 29, the co-owner of Crazy Otto’s diner in Leona Valley.

About 1,200 homes in the community of Leona Valley and parts of Palmdale were under mandatory evacuation orders Thursday evening, said Los Angeles County Fire Inspector Matt Levesque.

Two outbuildings and a hay house were destroyed by the flames.

KCAL-TV showed at least two structures fully engulfed in flames near where the blaze jumped a road and sent firefighters and sheriff’s deputies scattering.

“It’s fuel and topography driven, but when fires have this much fuel and burn this hot they make their own wind,” Levesque said.

State Route 14 snakes through the San Gabriel Mountains, connecting Los Angeles to the high desert. Angeles National Forest lands lie on either side. The area is west of the 250-square-mile zone scorched by last summer’s Station Fire, the largest wildland blaze in county history.

About 200 firefighters contained another blaze at 350 acres, Levesque said. A third fire was stopped at 30 acres.

Further north in Kern County, good weather helped firefighters build containment lines around two wildfires that destroyed homes in remote mountain communities earlier in the week.

A 2 1/2-square-mile blaze near Tehachapi on the western edge of the Mojave Desert was 44 percent contained after burning about 30 homes and other structures in a scattered community called Old West Ranch.

The community nonetheless remained evacuated, affecting about 150 people, said John Buchanan, spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The blaze erupted Tuesday afternoon and rapidly swept through an area where Kern County fire authorities say there is no history of any fires on record, meaning vegetation hadn’t burned there in more than a century.

To the north, a fire that destroyed eight residences and a few outbuildings as it spread across about 25 square miles of the Sequoia National Forest in the Sierra Nevada was 20 percent contained, authorities said.

The cause of the fires is under investigation.

source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100730/ap_on_re_us/us_california_wildfires

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Tagged: burn, bush fire, Wildfire explodes in rural LA County hills
Category: News break

Plane crash in Pakistan kills 152

July 28, 2010 | By admin | No Comments »

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100728/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan

By MUNIR AHMED and ASIF SHAHZAD, Associated Press Writers Munir Ahmed And Asif Shahzad, Associated Press Writers – 27 mins ago

ISLAMABAD – A passenger jet crashed into the hills surrounding Pakistan’s capital amid poor weather Wednesday, killing all 152 people on board and blazing a path of devastation strewn with body parts and twisted metal wreckage.

Initial Interior Ministry reports that five people survived the Airblue crash were wrong, said Imtiaz Elahi, chairman of the Capital Development Authority, which deals with emergencies and reports to the ministry.

“The situation at the site of the crash is heartbreaking,” Elahi said. “It is a great tragedy, and I confirm it with pain that there are no survivors.”

The dead included two U.S. citizens, said the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad without providing further details.

The crash left twisted metal wreckage hanging from trees and scattered across the ground on a bed of broken branches. Clouds of dense gray smoke rose up from the burning wreckage as a helicopter hovered above.

“I’m seeing only body parts,” Dawar Adnan, a rescue worker with the Pakistan Red Crescent, said by telephone from the crash site. “This is a very horrible scene. We have scanned almost all the area, but there is no chance of any survivors.”

The search effort was hampered by muddy conditions and smoldering wreckage that authorities were having trouble extinguishing by helicopter, Adnan said.

The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, but Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar said the government does not suspect terrorism.

The plane left the southern city of Karachi at 7:45 a.m. for a two-hour scheduled flight to Islamabad and was trying to land during cloudy and rainy weather, said Pervez George, a civil aviation official.

Airblue is a private service based in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, and Wednesday’s flight was believed to be carrying mostly Pakistanis.