The largest wildfire in the U.S. was spreading toward mountain resort towns in northern New Mexico, prompting officials to issue another set of warnings for more people to evacuate.
Meanwhile, a wildfire that erupted Wednesday afternoon in coastal Southern California raced through coastal bluffs of multimillion-dollar mansions, burning at least 20 homes, fire officials said. The flames were fanned by gusty ocean winds but they were dying down Wednesday night. No injuries were reported but several streets were ordered evacuated.
The fire, which occurred in Laguna Niguel, was relatively small at about 200 acres but the wind drove embers into palm trees, attics and dense, dry brush on slopes and steep canyons that hadn’t burned for decades, Brian Fennessy, chief of the Orange County Fire Authority, said at an evening news conference.
Fennessy said climate change has made even small fires that once would have been easily contained into extreme threats to life and property throughout the West.
As night fell, fire officials in New Mexico said the fastest-moving flames along the eastern front of the Sangre de Cristo range on the southern end of the Rockies were headed farther northeast – away from the area’s biggest population center in Taos, a well-known tourist enclave 40 miles south of the Colorado line.
“Currently no issues in the Taos area,” fire operations chief Todd Abel said. “The fire is kind of wanting to move to the north and east a little bit. But we’re…
