Springs Fire Burns to the Sea

 At around 10 PM last night I arrived for the graveyard shift for Reuters at the Springs Fire to relieve a colleague. It was very surreal, you could hear the flames roaring and the peaceful sound of the waves crashing on the beach simultaneously. 

Late Thursday evening, there wasn't too much firefighting happening because the flames were mostly on extremely steep hillsides. At my editor's suggestion I went about looking for a lifeguard tower to portray the story of the flames meeting the Pacific Ocean. I was down on the sand shooting reflections of the flames glowing on the water, and when I climbed up to the eerily empty highway, a police officer stopped to make sure I was ok because it was totally deserted at that spot except for my car parked on the road. He was super nice and asked if he could see the reflection photos.

The winds calmed down around 3 am or so and suddenly there were hardly any flames. I sat in my car editing and sending photos to the desk. Then I had some down time to rest until sunrise brought the winds back and bam, the fire was out of control and burning fiercely again and jumped PCH and started burning a remote section of the Point Mugu Naval base with a hardcore firefight taking place.  It was a crazy 12 hours on the fire lines for sure.