Three Blazes Keep Southland Firefighters Busy

The season’s largest brush fire broke out Tuesday at a campground in the Los Padres National Forest near Interstate 5 and had consumed at least 600 acres of forest land by Tuesday night.

Earlier in the day, two separate blazes broke out within hours of each other in hillside areas near the Foothill and Hollywood freeways in Los Angeles, tying up traffic for much of the day, Los Angeles city fire officials said.

Arson investigators were probing all three fires.

The Los Padres fire broke out about 2 p.m. in Kings Camp in Ventura County, a campground north of Pyramid Lake, fire officials said.

No homes were threatened, said Kathy Good, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service.

The cause of the fire had not been determined but when the blaze started there were campers at Kings Camp, officials said.

The fire was 40% contained by late Tuesday, but was not expected to grow substantially overnight.

The day’s first fire, reported about 10:20 a.m. in Tujunga, charred less than four acres near the eastbound Foothill Freeway west of the Lowell Avenue exit. Three water-dropping helicopters and more than 100 Los Angeles and Glendale firefighters doused the flames by 11:30 a.m., said Bob Collis, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department.

Two eastbound lanes of the Foothill Freeway were closed for more than three hours, backing up traffic for a mile to the La Tuna Canyon Road exit, said Officer Shirley Gaines, a California Highway Patrol spokeswoman.

A second fire broke out just before noon east of the Hollywood Bowl in the Cahuenga Pass, burning 10 acres of brush and grass, Collis said. That fire was extinguished by 1:15 p.m.

No buildings burned and no injuries were reported in either of those fires.

“Luckily this wasn’t a windy day, or things could have been a lot worse,” Collis said.