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More than 10,000 acres have been charred by 10 wildfires in Southern California flaring Thursday afternoon. The extremely dry conditions, of drought-ridden California with it's recent record breaking heat wave in SoCal, have set the stage for an extreme fire hazardous environment. Investigations are looking into what could have set the sparks: Teenage arson and truck fires spread by extreme wind conditions, have been aired as possible causes.

One death has been reported in the "400-acre Poinsettia Fire in Carlsbad on Thursday, officials said". A state of emergency has been declared by Gov. Jerry Brown and 20,000 evacuation notices have been sent out, including shutting down a university campus of 10,000 students in the middle of final exams.

Several Fire tornadoes were captured on video:




At 00:19 and 00:40, new footage:


What are Fire Tornadoes? Wiki says:
A fire tornado consists of a core - the part that is actually on fire - and an invisible pocket of rotating air that feeds fresh oxygen to the core. The core of a typical fire tornado is 1 to 3 feet (0.30 to 0.91 m) wide and 50 to 100 feet (15 to 30 m) tall. Under the right conditions, large fire tornadoes - several tens of feet wide and more than 1,000 feet (300 m) tall - can form. The temperature inside the core of a fire tornado can reach up to 2,000 °F (1,090 °C) - hot enough to potentially reignite ashes sucked up from the ground. Often, fire tornadoes are created when a wildfire or firestorm creates its own wind, which can turn into a spinning vortex of flame.

Combustible, carbon-rich gases released by burning vegetation on the ground are fuel for most fire tornadoes. When sucked up by a whirl of air, this unburned gas travels up the core until it reaches a region where there is enough fresh, heated oxygen to set it ablaze. This causes the tall and skinny appearance of a fire tornado's core.

Real-world fire whirls usually move fairly slowly. Fire tornadoes can set objects in their paths ablaze and can hurl burning debris out into their surroundings. The winds generated by a fire tornado can also be dangerous. Large fire tornadoes can create wind speeds of more than 100 miles per hour (160 km/h) - strong enough to knock down trees.

Fire tornadoes can last for an hour or more, and they cannot be extinguished directly.
Here we note that the fire tornado, as may well be the case for regular tornadoes, generates winds. That is to say that the wind conditions may actually be produced by electrical conditions between ground and air and effects from rotating electrical charge sheets. As Walter Thornhill notes on tornadoes:
Meteorologists are not sure how tornadoes form but they do know that they are often associated with severe electrical storms. The key to understanding tornadoes is that they are the result of rapidly rotating electric charge. Just as electrons are the current carriers in the copper wires we use for power transmission, so they are in the tornado. The BIG difference is that the electrons are moving at many metres per second in the tornado while they take several hours to move one metre in copper wire! The result is that enormously powerful electromagnetic forces are in control of the tornado.
A dramatic example of a Fire Tornado occurred in the Peshtigo Fire (Wisconsin, October 8, 1871), where:
On the day of the Peshtigo Fire, a cold front moved in from the west, bringing strong winds that fanned the fires out of control and escalated them to massive proportions. A firestorm ensued. In the words of one author, "A firestorm is called nature's nuclear explosion. Here's a wall of flame, a mile high, five miles (8 km) wide, traveling 90 to 100 miles per hour (160 km/h), hotter than a crematorium, turning sand into glass." By the time it was over, 1,875 square miles (4,860 km² or 1.2 million acres) of forest had been consumed, an area approximately twice the size of Rhode Island

[...]

The fire jumped across the Peshtigo River and burned on both sides of the inlet town. Survivors reported that the firestorm generated a fire whirl (described as a tornado) that threw rail cars and houses into the air.
And during the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake in Honshū, Japan.
The single greatest loss of life was caused by a fire tornado that engulfed open space at the Rikugun Honjo Hifukusho (formerly the Army Clothing Depot) in downtown Tokyo, where about 38,000 people were incinerated after taking shelter there following the earthquake.