A fast-burning wildfire triggered evacuation orders for 60,000 Southern California residents on Monday as hundreds of thousands elsewhere across the state endured a second straight day of power shutoffs due to heightened fire risks from high winds.
The latest threats came amid California’s worst wildfire season on record in terms of landscape burned, with more than 4 million acres scorched since the start of the year, along with thousands of homes destroyed and 31 lives lost.
Illustrating the fire threat posed by Southern California’s latest bout of dry, forceful Santa Ana gusts blowing out of the a desert, a wind-driven blaze dubbed the Silverado fire erupted early Monday and quickly spread across 2,000 acres of Orange County by midday. Wind-damaged electrical lines coming into contact with tinder-dry vegetation have been implicated in causing a number of devastating California wildfires in recent years, and utilities have increasingly resorted to such “public safety power shutoffs” to reduce the risk.
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