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One day of heat and light Santa Anas, and the hills erupt. Mandatory evacuations were ordered Wednesday in Bell Canyon, Box Canyon and other picturesque bends in the craggy sandstone mountains above Chatsworth. The scary part, of course, is that destructive fires have erupted here before and more than once raced all the way to the ocean at Malibu, devouring homes along the way. The Daily News has posted a couple of stirring photo galleries of burned structures and galloping flames. This photo, by Hans Gutknecht, is from Lilac Lane, a pretty colony set among boulders and oak trees in Santa Susana Pass. The neighborhood, not far from where the Manson Family hung out at Spahn Ranch (which burned to the ground in one of those Chatsworth-to-the-sea infernos in 1970), has a pre-railroad stagecoach route passing right through. It has suffered its share of fires and other disasters. In 1949, a Standard Airlines C-46 circling to land at Burbank crashed into the rocks near Lilac Lane and Mesa Drive, killing 35 people. Fourteen others survived, many of them shocked at being rescued by mysterious, long-haired and robed followers of cult leader Khrishna Venta who came out of their secretive compound in nearby Box Canyon to help. Daily News, Times
Also: With the Santa Ana season here, the LAFD blog is linking to the "routine fire weather planning forecast" out of the National Weather Service in Oxnard. The bottom line for today (as of 11:45 last night) is more of the same: warm and very dry. Friday is supposed to be cooler and more humid.