Nine days that rewrote the fire map.

At 1:30 on a Friday afternoon in late summer, a drainage east of the 210 caught fire. Before it was over, the La Tuna Fire had become the largest wildfire in the City of Los Angeles in half a century, closed the 210 Freeway in both directions for three days, and left the Verdugo Mountains stripped of vegetation for miles.

The first hour

The fire was reported shortly before 1:30 p.m. PDT on Friday, September 1, 2017, in a drainage area on the 10800 block of West La Tuna Canyon Road, on the south side of Interstate 210 in Sun Valley. When crews first arrived, the fire was roughly one acre in size. It looked, for a moment, containable.

Then the wind shifted. Embers blew north across the 210, sparking a second fire on the far side of the freeway, and within three hours the California Highway Patrol had closed the interstate between Lowell Avenue and Sunland Boulevard in both directions. By 4:00 p.m., the original one-acre fire had grown exponentially. By evening, it was at 2,000 acres and ten percent contained.

"We had that storm cell come through. We had a little bit of rain, and that was enough to push the fire in a totally different direction." — LAFD Capt. Branden Silverman

Day two: the mayor's emergency declaration

On Saturday, September 2, with Burbank reading 101°F and Tujunga at 96°F, the fire grew to 5,800 acres. More than 800 firefighters were assigned to the incident. Mandatory evacuations spread out from the initial La Tuna Canyon footprint into Burbank, Glendale, and the Sunland-Tujunga neighborhood of Los Angeles. At least 730 homes were under evacuation orders — about 300 in Burbank, 250 in Glendale, and 180 in the City of Los Angeles proper.

That Saturday night, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti declared a local emergency. He called on Governor Jerry Brown to declare a state emergency as well. Garcetti would go on to describe the La Tuna Fire as the largest wildfire in the history of the City of Los Angeles — a claim CNN fact-checked and partially agreed with, noting that the 2008 Sayre Fire in the Sylmar area had been larger, though the Sayre Fire technically burned in city-adjacent territory.

The shape of the burn

What made the La Tuna Fire so difficult was the terrain. The Verdugo Mountains are small — roughly 10 miles long — but the slopes are steep, the chaparral is old, and the ridgelines push fire in multiple directions at once depending on the wind. The blaze burned simultaneously toward Shadow Hills, Sun Valley, the eastern slopes above Burbank's Country Club Drive, and the southern flanks above Glendale. At its peak, the fire was active in at least four separate sectors.

The 210 Freeway stayed shut in both directions for three days. The Burbank DeBell Golf Club was evacuated. An emergency shelter was set up at Verdugo Hills High School. By Tuesday, September 5 — the evening of the long Labor Day weekend — the fire was 70 percent contained. On Saturday, September 9, the LAFD declared 100 percent containment. Final acreage: 7,194 acres.

The price

Five homes and five outbuildings were destroyed. Ten people were injured, most of them firefighters — four with heat-related illness, one with an allergic reaction to a bee sting, one with minor burns, and two civilians (one with heat illness, one an eye injury). There were, remarkably, no deaths.

Within four months, the canyon would prove that a fire doesn't stop being a fire when the flames go out. On January 9, 2018, debris flows poured out of the burn scar and into the streets of Sun Valley and Burbank.