A friend of mine who is staying with me after moving back from LA last month is a cameraman who has some amazing stock footage he shot of past years wild fires. He says that the steep sides of some of the canyons out there acts like chimneys... drawing flames up to the ridge lines and kicking sparks high into the air, which land in neighboring canyons, spreading the fires further.
Scary stuff.
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California wildfires seen from space
Several massive wildfires were raging across southern California over the weekend of October 25, 2003. Whipped by the hot, dry Santa Ana winds that blow toward the coast from interior deserts, at least one fire grew 10,000 acres in just 6 hours. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra satellite captured this image of the fires and clouds of smoke spreading over the region on October 26, 2003. The red polygons indicate precisely where the fires are burning, or have recently burned. (Compare this scene with one captured by the MODIS instrument aboard the Aqua satellite just one day before.)
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My mother-in-law is somewhere under the smoke of the San Bernadino Fire. 
More scary stuff: When I left for work this AM, "250,000" were being evacuated. Came home about an hour ago; "500,000".
I knew it was bad when I heard the TV news from another room this morning. The three areas they mentioned are nowhere near each other. The Governator said only a weather change will make a significant difference.
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You might want to check out www.wildfirealert.com. For a fee, it allows you to put in your home address and then uses government data bases to send you alerts on the location of new wildfires. It also has some cool google based maps.
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