Jul 19, 2015

Motorists flee cars to save lives from fire on highway - July 19, 2015

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/california-wildfire-torches-several-cars-on-major-highway


Last Updated Jul 18, 2015 7:35 AM EDT

LOS ANGELES -- A few minutes before they had been on the vacation of a lifetime, but now Russell Allevato and his family were running for their lives from a raging brushfire that had trapped them and hundreds of other terrified people on a traffic-jammed highway connecting Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
Play Video Vehicles engulfed in flames on California Highway

"People were screaming. It was just crazy," said Allevato, who watched helplessly Friday afternoon as flames engulfed his rental car and destroyed everything inside it while he, his nephew and two teenage daughters fled to safety.

"We were surrounded by the flames. They were to the left, then in front of us and they came around to the right. We were in a big horseshoe in the middle," he said as he spoke by phone from the safety of a California Highway Patrol vehicle.

33 Photos Wildfires in the West
The fire in the winding, mountainous Cajon Pass 55 miles northeast of Los Angeles began about 2:30 p.m. Friday in drought-ravaged dry grass below the elevated lanes of Interstate 15. Pushed by 40-mph winds, it raced up a hill and onto the traffic-clogged freeway, trapping literally hundreds of people amid a cauldron of smoke, flames and ash.



"We had some highway patrolmen who said they had never seen fire travel that fast," said Greg Kieran, a San Bernardino County Fire Hazmat specialist. "It just overran these people before they even knew what hit them."

CBS News correspondent Danielle Nottingham reports that even with firefighters dropping water on the scene flames jumped from vehicle to vehicle. Passenger cars, a semi-truck, a car-hauler and even a boat were completely destroyed.

Drivers and their passengers had no choice but to abandon their cars as the flames hopscotched down the freeway, destroying 20 vehicles, several of which exploded in fireballs.

Seventeen-year-old Talia Sclafani took a photo as she ran to safety and posted it on Instagram.

Continue Reading at.... http://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-wildfire-motorists-flee-cars-highway/