LOS ANGELES — Fire crews remain in battle mode as efforts to save the 116-year-old Mount Wilson Observatory from the raging Bobcat fire continue.
Days after officials announced that firefighters had beaten back advancing flames and the observatory was safe, firefighters are battling flare-ups at the top of the mountain.
“Just when I thought the danger was over — it wasn’t,” Thomas Meneghi, the observatory’s executive director, said Monday. “As I was leaving (Sunday), eight more strike units were rumbling up the road.”
It was the second time in a little over a decade that the gleaming white-domed observatory and its companion installations — including the towers that serve broadcast outlets and a variety of law enforcement and national security functions — have faced imminent threat of destruction from wildfire. In 2009, crews battled the Station fire from the ground and the sky over several days.
The Bobcat fire, which ignited Sept. 6, has grown to more than 105,000 acres — one of Los Angeles County’s largest blazes ever — and remains at 15% containment, the U.S. Forest Service said.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on Monday afternoon ordered the evacuations of people who live south and west of Upper Big Tujunga Canyon, east of Angeles Forest Highway and north of Angeles Crest Highway.
Firefighters have already used half of a 530,000-gallon water tank on the observatory grounds in their nearly weeklong battle against the blaze, Meneghi said. Crews are working to refill the tank and keep water pressure strong.
Officials from the U.S. Forest Service said Mount Wilson remains a top priority, noting that “multiple, multiple resources” have been dedicated to keeping the flames at bay.
“We are getting winds out of the east, so people are seeing flare-ups there,” Forest Service spokesman Larry Smith said Monday. “But there are no new evacuations (around Mount Wilson). There’s nothing to be concerned about.”
Fire crews were also focusing Monday on the Antelope Valley, where the massive blaze continues to loom large after forcing evacuations and charring multiple homes. The National Weather Service said fire weather conditions, including heat, dryness and gusty winds, could feed the flames and create the “potential for rapid growth and extreme fire behavior.”
“Out by the Bobcat fire, it’s still fairly warm and dry, and there will be afternoon and evening gusts of winds,” meteorologist David Sweet said from the weather service’s station in Oxnard. “And that’s the concern right there: dryness and gusty winds.”
Isolated wind gusts could reach as high as 40 mph, Sweet said. The winds will probably continue for the rest of the week.
Residents in the Juniper Hills area of the Antelope Valley anxiously awaited updates on their homes after evacuation orders last week.
“We kept watching the fire maps closely, and we knew that it was in our area,” said Juniper Hills resident Bridget Lensing, who evacuated her family’s home Thursday. “We were hoping and praying somehow our home would be spared.”
Lensing’s parents bought their Cima Mesa home in the 1980s, and both she and her brother were raised there. She said that her family rushed to spray the whole property with water before evacuating, and that they spent an “agonizing” 48 hours away from the area before returning to find much of their neighborhood destroyed.
