There's nothing left of his house. Keyon, 16, held up his smartphone, which displayed what looked like a pile of burnt matches. On Friday, September 13, sitting in the middle of an exhibition center transformed into a shelter by the Red Cross in Pomona, in the greater Los Angeles area, he recounted the sudden change in the atmosphere that preceded the arrival of the fire in Wrightwood, the village of 4,400 residents where he grew up to the northeast of the major California city: "the skies were like red and I was getting almost black with smoke, but we thought the fire was still very far away. And then the cops came with megaphones and said, 'You need to evacuate.'"

Like thousands of residents living in this mountainous region, Keyon and his family left everything behind in a matter of moments on Tuesday when the Bridge Fire, which had broken out two days earlier, suddenly doubled in size, carried by winds exceeding 80 km/h and temperatures over 40°C. On Tuesday, a plume of smoke was visible from Downtown Los Angeles in the heart of the city.

In just a few days, three major wildfires broke out within a radius of less than 100 kilometers around a city already suffering from the heat wave. After two relatively mild summers, Los Angeles has seen the resurgence of a risk it had been quick to forget. On local radio station LAist, experts advised residents living close to the fires to get their masks from the pandemic back out of the closet. And images of a chairlift threatened by flames in the small ski resort of Mountain High, one of the closest to Los Angeles, have been shown continually on local TV channels and social media.

The Bridge Fire, whose cause is currently unknown, is the one that most worries the authorities. In less than a week, it alone has devoured more than 210 square kilometers. "To give you a perspective, the city of Long Beach is 51,000 acres, so this fire is bigger than this city as far as the ground covered," pointed out Kenichi Haskett, a Los Angeles County firefighter in charge of Bridge Fire communications. Long Beach neighbors Los Angeles with a population of over 450,000.

Since Wednesday, the drop in temperatures below 30°C and the overnight humidity have enabled firefighters to contain the progression of the fire. But at the camp serving as headquarters set up by firefighters in Irwindale, in the valley below the Bridge Fire, mobilization remained at a maximum on Friday, with only 3% of the fire considered under control.

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