Azusa brush fire breaks out amid Red Flag Warning

Yeah, so we knew today was going to obviously be a windy day. It's panning out that way and the winds will get more intense as we go into tomorrow. We'll cover the forecast a bit later, but I want to start with what we see right now. So we're looking at this map here around Azusa. The fire is located right about here. I'm just going to use the mouse on the screen to kind of point out what we're talking about. So here's Azusa. Here's Glendora. And what you're looking at here are all these different weather stations available to us. The black numbers are the current temperatures. So we've got a lot of upper 80s, low 90s in this area. And the red numbers are kind of the current wind gusts, which are up there pretty high. And a little bit later, I'll back this out. You'll see just how strong some of those gusts are in other parts of the mountains. But as we come in closer to this particular station right here, this is very close to where the peak fire is. We have a current gust of 27 miles per hour out of the northeast. And if I bring you in a little bit closer to the exact details on this station, this is going to be, you know, a little messy for TV, but we're looking straight off a website here. So when we look at every 10 minutes, we get an observation from this weather station. There's 220, 210, 2 o'clock, and etc. And the right column right here is showing the gusts in kind of that magenta color. So again, the latest gust around 27 or so miles per hour. You can see over the course of the late morning to afternoon, we've seen gusts in the range of, I'm seeing some numbers around 25 to 35 miles per hour in there. So that's the kind of winds that we're looking at. And these wind speeds probably even increase a little more. It's not one of those situations where it's just windy during the day and then it calms down at night. It's actually going to be pretty windy late overnight tonight and into the morning as well. That was the look, by the way, the evacuation order. That's this kind of reddish color right here includes this neighborhood. And then you see the yellow boundary, which is the evacuation warning, as you talked about, Coco, which is where people should be prepared to possibly evacuate if deemed necessary. And then also you're going to see the aircraft kind of in in live real time here, the different types of aircraft. You see the helicopter. This is this water source. We've been watching the visuals of the helicopters getting water from this particular spot right here. And the peak fire is right here, very close by. So that's kind of convenient that we have that water source right there. I want to bring you back to the map to show you, and I'm going to have to just navigate this a little bit on air. So you're going to see some menus of the website, et cetera. But I want to show you some of the strongest wind gusts. So we're only going to look at wind gusts now, and I'll take this out a little bit farther across our area, and you can see just how intense some of the winds are right now. I know there's a lot of numbers on here, but there's all this great data to look at. So you'll see, first of all, much lower wind speeds around a lot of the LA basin. That was to be expected today, but you get up into the mountains, and this is color-coded, so it makes it kind of easier to see what's going on. Those orange numbers, we've got gusts in the 40s, gusts in the 50s in some parts of the San Gabriel Mountains, Santa Monica Mountains. We've got some gusts, 20s, 30s right now. We'll bring it out even farther. And again, you can see it's those high peaks, especially where we have some of the strongest winds. There's the Inland Empire, widespread gusts right now, 25, 35 miles per hour. Mountains looking at some higher wind gusts as well. So that's just kind of an overview of the state of the winds right now. If we can switch to weather one, and if you guys are okay with this right now, I'm going to run through kind of what our forecast looks like here going forward. Because again, we have the red flag warning, which initially was issued until the end of the day Friday. It's now in effect through Saturday. So Coco, I'll just make my way over sitting next to you here and we'll switch to the weather computer. And so this is a look at the current wind gusts. It's color coded again with the red, the purple color showing where the strongest winds are right now. Here's the relative humidity right now, which is running below 20% for a lot of us. And those very dry, low humidities will be with us through this entire event. Temperatures right now, again, it's pretty hot out there. That's another factor to all this. We've got many spots running 90 degrees or so at the current time. Again, there's your red flag warning just to kind of put a map to all this. So we've got the windy, very dry conditions in this kind of pink highlighted area. But even outside of that boundary of the red flag warning, we've got wind alerts, wind warnings that extend well out east into the Inland Empire, some of the mountains as well. So again, windy conditions, these in effect through Friday for some through Saturday for others just putting some numbers to it there's your forecast sustained wind speed so that's the top number and then gusts are below that when we say sustained wind speeds we're talking about the average wind speed over a couple minutes so you know 20 to 30 miles per hour in the San Fernando Valley the mountains though sustained wind speeds more like 25 to 35 and again gusts out of this event could reach 70 in some of the mountains and that's why we're you know there's these power shutoffs that have been happening in advance of this because uh you know winds of that nature can take down power lines and obviously spark a fire and cause it to spread and we don't want that to happen so that's why these these shutoffs tend to occur heat advisory in effect as well that's no surprise very hot uh forecast gusts going forward now so here's this afternoon i'm gonna kind of squint over here as we look at the uh this i'm a small little monitor right here so there's a look now at three o'clock in the morning tonight into tomorrow morning so still it's quite windy in those Santa Ana wind-prone areas. We get winds more out of the east tomorrow, which means maybe a little more of LA will see more of a breeze than what we have today just because of the angle the winds are coming in at. So that's tomorrow afternoon. And then even into Saturday, overall, the winds are not as strong over such a broad area, but there's still some hot spots where the winds are going to be pretty strong on Saturday. I've just got several graphics here lined up. Just want to skip ahead to tomorrow, the high temperatures. So today, again, we're finding temps around 90. Tomorrow's the hottest as we get into the mid 90s, even at the coast tomorrow. And so that's just going to zap the vegetation a little more. It's still going to be windy tomorrow. So hot, dry, windy conditions, you know, always in a situation like this, the conditions are right for a fire to start. We hope they don't start, but if they do, they could spread pretty quickly. And bouncing off of that hot, dry, windy conditions and speaking that it's going to be hotter even tomorrow. I'm sure that's why, you know, we're seeing the firefighters, they've been watering the area too, to a lot of Stu's points that he's been showing us, sometimes their water drops are directly on the flames. It's in the area. And I'm sure they just want to make sure to try to saturate that ground as best as possible. Of course. Yeah. And just kind of the nature of where this fire is right now. So to kind of if you can visualize it. So the winds are coming out of the northeast in this particular spot, which is kind of blowing towards the the flatland as opposed to up the hill. But then at the same time, you've got the terrain, which that alone can direct where a fire goes. Fires like to go uphill. So that might even be against the wind, which seems kind of counterintuitive that the flames could actually go in the opposite direction the winds are blowing. So all that is just kind of at play here as the experts, which, you know, they really know how to handle this, whether it's the terrain, the wind or a combination of all that. They know what they're doing. But I just want to point that out, that the wind is kind of blowing opposite of what the uphill direction of the flames would be. So I bring all that up to say that these flames could essentially spread in any direction. And then, of course, there's the whole underlying theme of these fires, especially when they get large, tend to create their own wind patterns in their immediate vicinity, and that makes things a little more complicated as well.