By M. Alex Johnson, Staff Writer, NBC News
A "very aggressive" fire in Southern California's San Jacinto Mountains grew to 9,000 acres, destroying at least six homes, spreading heavy smoke into the Coachella Valley and forcing the evacuation of the Camp Ronald McDonald campsite for children with cancer, officials said Tuesday.
"There's a disaster area in there. It's devastating," Scott Visyak, a spokesman for the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, told NBC Los Angeles?on Tuesday.
"There's several homes lost. There's several homes standing. The fire had just gone through there very aggressively," Visyak said.
The so-called Mountain Fire, which ignited at 1:43 p.m. (4:43 p.m. ET) Monday, was burning early Wednesday near Idyllwild Pine Cove, according to the joint state and federal incident report.?Visyak said it was headed over Palm Canyon and into Andreas Canyon.
The cause of the blaze is still under investigation, fire information officer Melody Lardner said Wednesday.
More than 1,500 extra firefighters poured into the region Tuesday after the fire nearly doubled in size, from 4,700 acres to 9,000 acres. At 8 p.m. (11 p.m. ET), about 2,250 firefighters from at least 16 local, state and federal agencies?were battling the blaze, which was only 10 percent contained and was projected to have "extreme" potential for further growth.
It was reclassified as a Type 1 incident management response ? the biggest there is. Fifteen helicopters and 10 air tankers were deployed Tuesday.
Stuart Palley / EPA
A woman watches flames from the Mountain Fire move over a hill.
However, only one helicopter had the capability to attack the blaze overnight, Lardner said.?
Bob Poole, a spokesman for the National Forest Service, said that there was?no immediate direct threat to significantly populated areas, but a mandatory evacuation order for Camp Ronald McDonald, a charitable facility for children with cancer, was issued Tuesday night, according to the official incident report.
Sarah Orth, the camp's executive director, said in a message to parents that campers and volunteers were told at dinner to pack up their belongings and were taken to Hemet High School, one of two regional evacuation centers.
A fleet of buses then took them away from the blaze late Tuesday.
Evacuations were also in effect for about 50 homes in the area, as well as the Living Free Animal Sanctuary and the Zen Mountain Center.?
Poole said six homes had been?destroyed in the Bonita Vista area, three of them mobile homes. Unspecified commercial property and a handful of other structures had been destroyed in the Pine Springs area, he said.?
The flames were spreading through timber and chaparral, or shrubland, ?that are highly flammable because of the dry winter, officials said. Ninety-plus-degree daytime temperatures, humidity in the single digits and shifting winds have also presented fire crews with a challenging task.
Lardner added that the steep terrain made it hard to access the fire, but crews were working shifts in the attempt to contain it.?
NBC News' Henry Austin and Sossy Dombourian contributed to this report.
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This story was originally published on Tue Jul 16, 2013 5:53 PM EDT
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