The Airport fire is a twenty three thousand acre wildfire that started in Orange County near the Trabuco Fliers club, which is an RC plane airport, on Trabuco Creek Road and in the dry woodlands next to Trabuco Creek. The fire then expanded up the Santa Ana mountains, splitting into a fire that is moving into two different directions, and a burn area from around the Modjeska peak, Trabuco Peak, and the Yaeger Mesa heading in the direction of Temescal. Yaeger Mesa acting as the divider between the two points the fire was going. The other side of the fire was heading towards Lake Elsinore, albeit slowly at the time, creeping up onto Los Pinos Peak and extending to Sugarloaf and New Sugarloaf. This is when the wind direction made a scary turn to blow relatively hard towards Lake Elsinore, in turn making the fire advance aggressively to Lake Elsinore in the El Cariso area and Lakeland Village. It was around this time when Riverside County started sending its own fire stations in the general area to help with the fire. Then the fire made its way past Los Pinos Peak, Sugarloaf, and New Sugarloaf, burning all of it in the process, making its way towards and through Blue Jay Campground and Falcon Group Campsite, burning everything in evacuation area ELC01. The first buildings in Lake Elsinore were burned at this time. It’s also around this time when the old fire scars from the Holy Fire started to slow down the Airport Fire, while great at the moment, it also accidentally acted like a funnel that was directing the fire straight into El Cariso, so it’s a good thing they put up a line to stop it from marching into El Cariso, right? Nah, the fire burned over the line into El Cariso, but somehow it wasn’t super damaging, and then in an actually good change of events, due to the cooler weather on Wednesday, it spearheaded on to firefighter division L, which is closer to Lakeland, because it meant Firefighter Division J got to put all their efforts into helping division L. Then finally through a change of wind direction on Thursday, both divisions got the main force of the fire out. Then on Friday evening, the stalemated fire closer to Temescal was squandered. Two days later, they’re still doing clean up on our mountain range.
If you are wondering how I got this information, I got it from my friend, junior fireman, former Hotshot crew member and currently a line burner, Dylan Diaz, as well as trusted fire watch app, Watch Duty.
