How the Mountain fire exploded into SoCal’s most destructive in years

The warnings Wednesday morning were dire: Southern Ventura County was primed to be hit with the region’s most ferocious Santa Ana wind event in years, creating extremely critical fire weather in the area.

And the conditions lived up to the billing, with 60- to 80-mph gusts slamming the foothills of Moorpark and Camarillo. Alone, the winds were dangerous. But once a small fire ignited in the wilderness north of Somis, the seeds for disaster were firmly planted.

“We’re talking about the most volatile of volatile conditions that can come together to create the development of a large fire — fast,” said Ariel Cohen, the lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Oxnard office. “And that’s exactly what we saw with the Mountain fire.”

Within hours, the blaze had jumped over the 118 Freeway from the rugged Santa Susana Mountains and was tearing across neighborhoods in the hills above Camarillo.

Fire officials are used to battling large fires this time of year, but a ruinous combination of extreme conditions and challenging geography hampered early efforts. The winds were so fierce that retardant-dropping aircraft were grounded, at least temporarily. The fire moved so fast that officials were forced to focus on evacuations rather than firefighting.

“We were presented with very, very extreme Santa Ana conditions. That of course changes our tactics,” said Capt. Tony McHale of the Ventura County Fire Department. “So we go into a more defensive posture, and the number one priority in that is human life.”

Water pressure in some areas also became erratic, forcing crews to shuttle water up to some key positions in the firefight — though it is still not clear what effect that might have had. Officials have said it did not affect operations, but others on the ground called it a challenge.

It probably didn’t help that much of southwest California was similarly on high alert for fires, included in that elevated red flag warning. At least one fire sparked at the same time in Malibu, which initially was also threatening homes.

The entire situation fueled what would become one of Southern California’s most destructive wildfires in recent years. In less than 24 hours, the Mountain fire destroyed more than 130 structures, primarily homes in the foothills around Camarillo, and damaged 88 others, fire officials said.

As winds started to subside Thursday night, firefighters made their first inroads against the blaze, reaching 5% containment. As of Friday afternoon, more than 20,700 acres had burned — the majority singed on Wednesday — and crews said the fire was 7% contained.

Officials are hopeful they’ve turned a corner in the fight, but both residents and crews remain stunned by the speed and force of the fire.

When a fire moves this fast and casts that many embers everywhere, it’s extremely hard to fight or predict, said Kyle Ferris, fire behavior analyst with the Mountain Fire Incident Command Team. He said the houses that ended up falling victim to the flames were virtually chosen at random — at the mercy of wherever embers happened to land, some jumping up to a mile ahead of the main fire.

Linda Elmo, 75, watched as the winds picked up Wednesday morning, and though she was listening to the news, she didn’t receive notice about an evacuation until a firefighter knocked on the door and told her and her husband to “go, go, go!”

“It happened so fast,” Elmo said. All of a sudden, the blaze “was in this canyon by the house in the backyard.”

Firefighters first responded around 9 a.m. to a large brush fire on South Mountain in the Santa Susana Mountains. Within an hour, officials had issued the first evacuation orders around Moorpark as they tried to respond to the fast-moving blaze.

By 11 a.m., widespread evacuations were ordered as the blaze marched toward the Camarillo foothills and higher into the mountains — where winds blew stronger, pushing stray embers even farther ahead of the blaze, officials reported. Around 3 p.m., about six hours after the fire was first spotted, it had exploded to almost 9,000 acres without any containment, burning dozens of homes to a crisp.

Karen Cihigoyenetche, 81, and her husband Raymond, 92, were warned about the fire by a serviceman from their cable company, who begged them to leave the house.

She jumped into action, trying to call all of her elderly neighbors. She grabbed her emergency bag packed with cash, extra clothes and medicine.

“The traffic was really bad, and a lot of emergency vehicles trying to get through the traffic,” Cihigoyenetche said. “Unbelievable.”

CaroleAnn Higa, 77, and a roommate escaped their home to the roar of helicopters overhead. She stuffed some clothes and her respirator into her purse, and her roommate loaded her oxygen tank into the car. When she exited the house, she said, the smoke was so thick she could barely see across the street.

“You can’t breathe,” she said. “It hits your chest and you’re gasping for air,” she said.

It still isn’t clear how the fire started, but officials are focusing on at least one victory in this incident: No deaths or major injuries have been reported. Cohen said that’s a testament that the warnings were adequately dire and messaging well coordinated, which allowed emergency officials to pre-position resources and residents to be as ready as possible.

“You can’t completely stop something that has this much inertia, spreading this quickly with as much fuel burning as fast as it is. However, when we see the fire stops as a certain point — it didn’t go all the way to the coast, for instance — ultimately, many lives were saved,” Cohen said. “No one was caught off guard.”

The Mountain fire could have been a second coming of the 2017 Thomas or 2018 Woolsey fires, but luckily it didn’t pan out that way, said Mark Lorenzen, the Ventura County Fire Department chief from 2012 to 2022.

The Thomas fire — which destroyed over 1,000 structures and burned more than 281,000 acres in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties — grew under similar circumstances as the Mountain fire, with low humidity, active Santa Ana winds and lots of dry brush in mixed urban and rural areas.

“All the conditions were perfect for a fire of this magnitude,” the retired fire chief said. If the windy conditions had persisted longer, Lorenzen thinks it could have been much worse.

“In spite of the homes that were lost there, there’s a measure of success in avoiding loss of human life,” he said.

This region is one that has seen many fires over the years, especially in the autumn when Santa Ana winds pick up along this “favorable corridor” for the dry, blustery winds, Cohen said.

In the area of the Mountain fire footprint, six other wildfires have burned more than 1,000 acres since 1986. Most recently, the 2023 South and 2019 Maria fires burned thousands of acres in the western section of the current perimeter.

More frequent and larger fires create a dangerous cycle that burns through the more resilient brush and trees, making room for quick-to-dry invasive grasses. That phenomenon was particularly relevant this year, after two years of extreme growth were followed by record-setting late-summer heat.

“This was definitely an area with very high vulnerability,” Cohen said. Consecutive 12-month periods with up to twice the normal amount of precipitation produced a lot of “smaller fuels” in the form of vegetation, brush and grasses, he said, “and that ends up being the foundation for fires to very efficiently spread.”

Times staff writers Jireh Deng, Sean Greene, Noah Goldberg, Nathan Solis and Joseph Serna contributed to this report.