California wildfire burns homes and forces entire town to flee.

A wind-whipped fire that erupted near a defunct lumber mill in Northern California exploded on Friday into a fast-moving inferno, burning homes and prompting the evacuation of thousands of people in rural Siskiyou County, fire authorities said.

The Mill fire — one of at least three sizable California wildfires to ignite in the past three days — came as a massive heat wave roasted the West, parching the landscape. Excessive heat warnings are in effect across much of the state.

Los Angeles County firefighters on Friday were continuing to battle a fire near Castaic that had consumed more than 5,000 acres and that had closed parts of Interstate 5 on Wednesday. Another fire, east of San Diego, led to evacuations earlier this week and closed the Tecate Port of Entry at the border with Mexico. Both are partially contained.

Jon Heggie, a battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said that the first call on Friday came in at 12:49 p.m. from a subdivision in the town of Weed, near a property owned by a wood products company, where some older buildings were in the process of being demolished. Within two hours, the blaze had grown to some 900 acres and evacuation orders had been issued for Weed and several nearby communities.

By 7 p.m., the blaze had grown to 2,580 acres, Cal Fire authorities said.

Kimberly Greene, the mayor of Weed, said that she was at the local community center, rebuilt after a 2014 wildfire, when the spouse of co-worker ran in and reported smoke in the distance.

“By the time we walked outside,” she said, “you could see the flames jumping the street.”

The air was hot and dry, she said, and the wind was “howling.” She rushed home and packed her car while fielding reports from fire authorities and from her neighbors in the working class town of about 2,900.

“We have our toiletries and our important papers, we have our guns out of the safe and packed and our trailer ready to go,” she said. She had not yet heard of any fatalities, but she said that a number of homes had been destroyed and that the swiftness of the blaze concerned her.

“This one was so fast, I’m worried some people might not have gotten out,” she said.

Weed was devastated in September 2014 by the Boles fire, a relatively small but intense blaze that consumed 165 homes and other buildings in the small community.

The town is roughly 30 miles southeast of where the McKinney fire raged this summer and became California’s largest blaze in 2022, killing four people and burning more than 60,000 acres.