A 150-acre brush fire in Saugus prompted road closures and evacuations Thursday afternoon.
The fire received the moniker #TexasFire, due to its proximity to the Texas Canyon Ranger Station, and Angeles National Forest officials took the lead in battling the blaze, with the L.A. County Fire Department assisting.
Fire officials declared forward progress stopped at 10% containment at 4:20 p.m. and no structures lost.
Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station personnel had announced road closures for Bouquet Canyon Road between Vasquez Canyon Road and Spunky Canyon. Evacuations of about 50 homes took place in that area and were lifted soon after, according to spokeswoman Shirley Miller.
“It’s fire season — I have a water truck in my house full of water with hoses on it.” said John Redmond, a Bouquet Canyon resident near Texas Canyon since 1999. “But it’s always scary; fires do nasty things. We’re lucky we don’t have a lot of wind.”
The fire was first reported to the Los Angeles County Fire Department at 1:47 p.m. on the 30500 block of Bouquet Canyon Road and was described to be burning uphill in medium to heavy fuel.
“We got on the scene at 1:57 p.m.,” said Marvin Lim, a spokesman for the Fire Department.
The first report of the fire had it at 3 acres, but by 2:15 p.m., units on the ground were saying it had quickly grown to 100 acres, with structures threatened and 0% containment, according to Andrew Mitchell, a public information officer with the Angeles National Forest.
Officials did not clarify as of 2:20 p.m. what type of structures were threatened, but said L.A. County Fire Department personnel would be protecting the structures, and fire personnel would be staging some emergency response personnel and vehicles at Central Park.
On the scene, according to Mitchell, there is a “second full-alarm” response, with five fire engines, two hand crews, two water tenders, two patrols, two chief officers, three helicopters and five airplanes.
“We’re making good progress,” said ANF Fire Chief Robert Garcia at approximately 3:45 p.m.. “That means that fire crews that are coming down to the bottom of the canyon have started hose lays off the fire engines and they’ll pump hose lays as they can.”
Hand crews had already ascended several thousand feet up the hill with bulldozers to the top of the ridge by 3:45 p.m.. “We’re not out of the woods yet, we have a lot of work to do, but we’re already making really good progress,” Garcia added.
The second-alarm response, Mitchell said, meant that both the County Fire Department and ANF requested more resources from around their department in order to battle the blaze.
