Two huge wildfires are tearing through southern California


Record heat and two fast-moving wildfires prompted evacuations in southern California Saturday as about 1,000 firefighters struggle to contain the blazes. The Whittier Fire is in Los Padres National Forest, north of Los Angeles. It was started by a vehicle fire Saturday afternoon and spread across 5,400 acres in a matter of hours.
The nearby Alamo Fire has grown to nearly 20,000 acres. "Low humidity, high heat, and the winds are right — and there's just a lot of stuff to burn," said a Santa Barbara County representative. Neither fire has destroyed any buildings so far.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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