Southern California fire burns mobile homes, Malibu mansions

Associated Press

MALIBU, Calif.

Two people were found dead as a pair of wildfires stretched from inland canyons to the Pacific in Southern California on Saturday, leaving people sifting through the remains of both mansions and modest homes for anything they had left.

The two bodies were found severely burned inside a car on a long residential driveway in Malibu, Los Angeles County sheriff’s Chief John Benedict said. The home is on a winding stretch of Mulholland Highway with steep panoramic views.

And in Northern California, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said his department has reports of 110 people still missing in a massive wildfire that has scorched 164 square miles. This was after the sheriff said 14 bodies were found

The deaths bring to 25 the number of people killed in the state’s wildfires in the past few days, with 23 found dead in the Northern California wildfire.

Firefighters have saved thousands of homes despite working in “extreme, tough fire conditions that they said they have never seen in their life,” Los Angeles County Fire Chief Daryl Osby said.

Those vicious conditions on Friday night gave way to calm Saturday, with winds reduced to breezes. No new growth was reported on the larger of the two fires, which stands at 109 square miles, and firefighters now have the blaze 5 percent contained.

Osby said losses to homes were significant but did not say how many had burned. Officials said earlier that 150 houses had been destroyed, and the number would rise.

Fire burned in famously ritzy coastal spots such as Malibu, where Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian West, Guillermo del Toro and Martin Sheen were among those forced out of their homes amid a citywide evacuation order.

The flames also burned inland through hills and canyons dotted with modest homes, reached into the corner of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, and stretched into suburbs such as Thousand Oaks, a city of 130,000 people that just a few days ago saw 12 people killed in a mass shooting at a country music bar.

Wildfire raged on both sides of the city still in mourning, where about three-quarters of the population are under evacuation orders that officials urged them to heed.

“We’ve had a lot of tragedy in our community,” said Ventura County Supervisor Linda Parks, whose district includes Thousand Oaks. “We don’t want any more. We do not want any more lives lost.”

Nothing was left but the horses for Arik Fultz, who spent Saturday sifting through the remains through the charred remains of his 40-acre ranch near Malibu.

“It just doesn’t feel real that it’s all gone,” Fultz said. “Just yesterday, what, 24 hours ago I was feeding horses in the morning.”

Two houses, two barns, three trailers and decades of accumulated possessions are gone.

All 52 horses survived, after a wild scramble to save them.

Fultz’s mother, 61-year-old Tricia Fultz, said everyone expected the fire to stay well south of their property, but shifting winds forced them to take the horses out to open pastures as quickly as they could.

She, her husband and six others rode out the fire in a tunnel a short distance up the road as the fire burned the hillsides above and all around them.