Active wildfires near the valley right now, from CAL FIRE — and the official channels that decide evacuations.
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Three times in nine years the valley has emptied canyon by canyon — the Sand Fire in 2016, the Tick Fire in 2019, the Hughes Fire in 2025. So when there is smoke on the ridgeline, the question is reasonable. This page reads CAL FIRE's statewide incident list and answers for the area around Santa Clarita.
Grande Fire — 9 miles west of town (in the valley).
As of July 9 at 3:25 PM.
| Fire | Where | Size | Contained | Updated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grande Fire | 9 miles west — Henry Mayo Dr at Pico Canyon Rd, Piru | 50 acres | Not reported | July 9 at 8:22 AM |
This page is not an alert system
If you smell something burning and CAL FIRE shows nothing nearby, the other suspect is the Chiquita Canyon landfill in Castaic, where an underground chemical reaction has produced odors since 2023. That is an air-quality complaint, not a fire response: report it to South Coast AQMD at 1-800-CUT-SMOG (1-800-288-7664) or aqmd.gov/complaints, and see this site's Chiquita Canyon page for where things stand.
Every canyon neighborhood — Sand, Placerita, Tick, Hasley, San Francisquito — is a wildland finger reaching into suburbia. The Hughes Fire went from roughly 50 acres to over 9,000 in about six hours in January 2025, and put about 30,000 people under evacuation orders the same day. That is why knowing your Genasys zone before fire season matters more than refreshing any page during one.
This page shows incidents from CAL FIRE's public feed. Small or fast-moving local responses handled by the LA County Fire Department can appear late or not at all, and acreage and containment figures lag the ground truth in a fire's first hours — one more reason official alerts, not this page, decide anything.
Checked July 9 at 3:25 PM. Incident data from CAL FIRE — California state incident information is published for public use (per the state’s conditions of use, generally public domain). Acreage and containment lag the ground truth, especially in a fire’s first hours.