Stuart Palley / EPA
A woman watches flames from the Mountain Fire move over a hill.
By M. Alex Johnson, Staff Writer, NBC News
A "very aggressive" fire in Southern California's San Jacinto Mountains grew to 9,000 acres Tuesday, destroying a 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.
"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 Tuesday evening 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.
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 night.
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Bob Poole, a spokesman for the National Forest Service, told NBC News 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 early Tuesday evening, 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.
Camp staffers were calling and messaging parents to provide pick-up information, she said.
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 are 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.
"With the heavy fuels we've got and the temperatures we're experiencing, it's making it a very aggressive, hot fire right now," Visyak said.
Sossy Dombourian of NBC News 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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