As Hughes fire swells, nearby residents take in the flames

As the sun began to set over Castaic Lake on Wednesday, the hills to the north and east were engulfed in flames, casting an eerie orange glow across the valley below.

The Hughes fire ignited earlier in the day north of Castaic and by evening had grown to more than 9,000 acres, forcing the evacuation of about 31,000 people.

On Lake Hughes Road, wooden piles supporting power lines had burned and snapped, spreading high-voltage wires like snakes across the pavement.

Overhead, a pair of firefighting helicopters circled in constant, hurried laps between the lake and the burning hillsides. It took them only about a minute to fill their water tanks with hoses as they hovered above the surface, and then only a couple of more minutes to drop their loads on the flames and return for more.

South of the lake, a large, empty field burned as dozens of fire trucks fought the remaining embers. Across Ridge Route Road, where a string of apartment buildings stood a stone’s throw from the flames, residents watched the spectacle like fans at a sporting event — phones held aloft, sharing the shocking images with friends and family via livestreaming video.

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Antonio Morataya had been at work about 15 minutes away when he heard the field next to his apartment building was burning.

He raced home, tossed his passport and whatever other documents he could lay his hands on into his car, and then stepped outside to watch what turned into an hours-long battle between firefighters and the flames.

Flames overtake a hill amid thick smoke in Castaic on Wednesday.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

A few blocks east of Interstate 5, with nothing burning between him and the freeway, he had a decent escape route if things went bad — assuming the roads didn’t get snarled with traffic.

He joked about feeling “safe” because there is a tiny county firehouse half a block away, “but the fire was even closer!”