Fire officials battling the Palisades blaze, the largest in the Los Angeles area, said late Saturday that they had made progress, managing to stop the fire from pushing downhill into a residential area of Mandeville Canyon by removing dry vegetation that could help it spread.
“We cut out all the brush and grass down to bare soil, right up to the fire’s edge, so there’s nowhere for the fire to go,” Rick Carhart, a public information officer at Cal Fire, said late Saturday.
Residences on Mandeville Canyon Road, including multimillion-dollar homes with panoramic city views, were out of immediate danger, he said, but added that the fire was not fully contained and “we are not leaving that area.”
Earlier Saturday, the area had become the most critical zone in the battle to contain the Palisades fire, which has burned more than 23,000 acres. At least one house in the canyon burned, as aircraft dropped water and flame retardant in an attempt to protect other homes.
By the evening, helped by a lull in the windy conditions that have fueled the wildfires, firefighters said they had secured the southern edge of the fire, from the Westridge area to Mandeville Canyon Road, said Christian Litz, the operations lead for the Palisades fire at Cal Fire.
“Winds are in our favor in that area, so it looks really good,” he said. “We have to work really hard though in the area to secure it.”
The battle was likely to pick up again on Sunday, with forecasters calling for another round of high desert winds.
Mandeville Canyon, a small neighborhood in the Brentwood section of West Los Angeles, was under a mandatory evacuation order on Saturday, but some residents stayed behind. As night fell, the cliffs high above the houses glowed with fire. A daylong aerial assault from helicopters and planes dropping fire retardant had largely stopped, and a few firefighters rested in folding chairs or on curbsides, watching the cliffs.
