Flames roared and smoke billowed, heralding the onset of yet another inferno in Los Angeles County on Wednesday, approximately 10:45 AM. This particular blaze erupted perilously close to Castaic Lake. By Wednesday evening, nearly 31,000 individuals had received mandatory evacuation orders, with an additional 2,300 under precautionary evacuation warnings.
The Hughes Fire struck particularly hard for Sophia Lesseos, a former FOX26 News reporter familiar to our audience. During our conversation, massive columns of smoke loomed ominously behind her. "He was saying, 'I'm scared. There's so much smoke, I can barely see the house right now when I got home,'" Lesseos recounted, relating her nephew's harrowing firsthand account.
Sophia described the scene en route to assist her boyfriend's family as apocalyptic. Her boyfriend's family swiftly sprang into action, dousing the house with water and setting up sprinklers as a preventive measure. The chaos wasn't confined to homeowners alone; some drivers along Interstate 5 were also in a desperate rush to flee the impending danger.
"Visibility dropped almost to zero, and everyone was in a state of utter panic," recounted Johnnie Berumen, a truck driver from Tulare. He barely made it across in time to return to the valley. Caltrans eventually shut down I-5 in both directions. Berumen emphasized, "There was simply no way to travel to or from Southern California."
Though he had driven through fog before, he emphasized that it paled in comparison to the peril of navigating through this smoke-choked landscape. "It's definitely worse than fog, especially with the fierce winds and thick smoke. Zero visibility when it's that bad... the fire spread from 500 acres to over 5,000 in less than an hour; it was incredibly intense," he said.
