While driving near his home in Sherman Oaks, California, early one morning last week, Patrick Hercamp had the top down on his convertible when he noticed a campfire smell.
As he turned onto a street he normally takes on his way to work, there was bumper-to-bumper traffic, and he said it looked like there was fog everywhere.
But it wasn’t fog. It was smoke from a faraway wildfire.
“I was stuck breathing it for an hour until I could pull off the road and put my top up,” the Seymour native said.
The next morning, he wanted to try to beat the traffic, so he started his drive at 5 a.m.
It was dark outside, but as he pulled on the highway, he could see a glow up ahead. A wildfire referred to as Skirball had taken over a hill.
“The highway hadn’t been shut down yet, so I drove past, and it looked like Mount Doom from ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and because it was on a hill, it was just a wall of embers,” Hercamp said. “The fire was so hot I could feel it through my window, and I was on the opposite side of the highway.”
He said that was his first time seeing a wildfire up close.
“I travel all over the world, live out of the country five months out of the year, and this was one of the craziest things I’d ever seen,” said Hercamp, an actor and comedian who has been in Los Angeles, California, since 2009.
The next day, he said it was just all just dirt, and that dirt was smoking.
“The reason the homes there burnt is because they were built on the hill, and it’s just empty brush and wildlife under it,” Hercamp said.
The Skirball fire was less than two miles from his home, and he didn’t expect it to reach his home.
Earlier this week, that fire was 85 percent contained.
“There is just too much concrete between me and the fire,” he said.
After announcing increased containment on one of the biggest wildfires in California history, officials warned Wednesday that communities remain at risk and the threat could increase as unpredictable winds whip up again, according to The Associated Press.
Red Flag warnings for fire danger due to Santa Ana winds and a critical lack of moisture were extended with a possible increase in gusts into the end of the week.
Evacuations continued Wednesday for the seaside enclaves of Montecito, Summerland and Carpinteria and the inland agricultural town of Fillmore, The Associated Press reported.
Officials announced Tuesday night that crews had carved containment lines around one-quarter of the blaze straddling Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
The so-called Thomas fire has burned more than 900 structures, at least 700 of them homes, since it broke out Dec. 4, The Associated Press said. It stretches across nearly 370 square miles of southern California, making it the fifth largest in state history.
Elsewhere, fire officials announced a cooking fire at a homeless encampment sparked a blaze last week that destroyed six homes in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Arson investigators determined the Skirball fire near the Getty museum was started by an illegal fire at a camp near a freeway underpass, city fire Capt. Erik Scott told The Associated Press.
The camp was empty when firefighters found it, but people apparently had been sleeping and cooking there for at least several days, he said.
Back at the largest of the wildfires, firefighters protected foothill homes while the flames churned mostly into unoccupied forest land, Santa Barbara County Fire Department spokesman Mike Eliason told The AP.