Even after several years of devastating wind-driven fires in Southern California, forecasters fear that the next three days could bring new levels of danger.
“Extreme” fire weather is expected to begin in the Los Angeles area at 11 p.m. Tuesday and persist for 30 hours, bringing isolated gusts of up to 80 mph. It’s an unusually long Santa Ana wind condition, and fire weather of this kind hasn’t been seen in Southern California since October 2007, when similar conditions helped unleash the sixth most destructive fire in California history.
“This is the worst since we had an event in October 2007,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Tom Fisher. “Don’t let your guard down.”Dangerous winds are forecast to blow so hard that there’s a threat of downed power lines. Mountains could see gusts of up to 80 mph; valley passes, canyons and coastal areas between the Hollywood Hills to Malibu and the Ventura County coasts could see gusts of up to 60 mph.
“This all adds up to an extreme fire weather threat, meaning that conditions are as dangerous for fire growth and behavior as we have seen in recent memory,” the weather service in Oxnard said.Red flag warnings — a term to warn of high fire weather danger — are already supposed to spark alarm bells for the general public. But this one is on the higher end of any similar period of fire weather in the past dozen years.
“It’s not a routine red flag warning event. It’s on the high end of the scale, in terms of weather significance,” said Joe Sirard, meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “We want to emphasize the exceptional danger of this type of event.”
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