I pulled off Interstate 5 and there it was: a billowing column of smoke, opaque and dark against a bluebird sky. I thought the fire would be hard to find. It wasn't. When I arrived in Castaic last week, the Hughes fire was climbing up a slope at the base of Castaic Lagoon. I walked across Ridge Route Road, its four lanes closed to traffic. The flames were just across the ravine, separated from me by only a small river bed and a plane of golden grass, crisp and dry. I paused, unsure, breathing through a respirator mask. Electricity snapped and buzzed in the power lines overhead. Should I get closer? Was I safe to do so? I grew up in Los Angeles but now live in Brooklyn, where I report on New York for the Metro desk. I'd never covered something like this before. I tried to remember everything I'd learned about natural disasters during a training months earlier. Park with your car facing away from danger. Make sure someone knows where you are. Don't be stupid. Castaic residents who hadn't evacuated milled around, as unsure as I was. Together, we watched the fire leap and dance. It came south around a bend in the hillside and crept down, catching the brush yards away from us. "OK," I told a man in a red hoodie standing to my right, "that's close enough." Back in my rental car, I drove south on Ridge Route Road. I pulled into the parking lot of a rec center. Just seconds later, the fire was there, too, flickering in the dry grass in the distance. Time seemed to slow in the fire's presence. The sky glowed in strange ways and the round ball of the sun turned blood-red. After sunset, flare-ups twinkled like low stars, menacing and mesmerizing against black hills. The interstate was eerily quiet. Helicopters above thrummed low and loud. Bulldozers groaned back and forth across the dry landscape, clearing brush and chewing up ground. Wildfire is a visible beast, but it's an audible one, too. I pushed farther south, parking near an evacuated animal shelter where firefighters and officers were congregating. "It's getting sporty out here, man," one firefighter told another. A gust of wind brought flames peeking over the top of a ridge above us. Covering disasters, I learned, has a way of doing something to you: They teach you something about the world, and they teach you something about people, but they also teach you something about yourself. Just because you're fully trained doesn't mean you're not a little bit scared. And just because you're a little bit scared doesn't mean you can't do your job. And so that's what I did.
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California Today: These Are the Winds That Turn Wildfires Deadly in L.A.
January 29, 2025
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