A brush fire reported Wednesday morning in Neenach grew fast enough to force evacuation warnings and orders as crews rushed to contain it west of Lancaster in Los Angeles County. By 45 minutes after it was first reported around 9:45 a.m., the fire had climbed from about 2 acres to as much as 80 to 100 acres.
That kind of jump is what made the fire urgent. It started in the area of 265th Street West and Avenue B 8, near state Route 138 and the Kern County line, and it went to a second alarm just after 10 a.m. Five air units were sent in as ground crews worked the blaze, a response that underlined how quickly the fire outpaced the first minutes of the response.
The structure threat stood out because the fire was burning in a remote part of Los Angeles County west of Lancaster, not in a dense neighborhood where evacuation calls usually land with immediate force. Even so, the warnings and orders followed the fire’s spread, and the size increase left little room for delay as crews tried to get a handle on it.
What remains unsettled is the basic question that matters most after the fast-moving front has been checked: whether the fire was contained, and whether any damage was done. No cause was given, and no information was released on structures lost or saved, leaving the next update to determine how far the blaze ultimately ran.
