The sun is orange. It's burning, burning, the sky is burning. And it's like it's snowing, only ash is falling. This is what Bulgarian singer Sonya Vasi sees from her backyard. She has lived in the City of Dreams for 34 years. She has seen many natural disasters, but never so close to home.
"You can't even drink water here now. It says that you only need bottled water. And all the shops are closed. It's like a movie. You're watching a movie and you can't believe you're in it," she explained to Nova TV.
According to Sonya, the cause of the fiery inferno is the strong wind. A five-meter tree has torn off the wires near her home and no one has been able to repair them for three days. There is no electricity, and the signal is bad. The flames have caused an information blackout.
"We have no electricity, we can't watch TV. We don't know what's going on. I see the neighbors moving out one by one. We wanted to evacuate, but I have three cats. There's a Bulgarian woman very close to us whose house burned down in La Cresset. She's coming back from Bulgaria," Vasi pointed out.
California firefighters are unable to extinguish the flames, which are coming from all directions. They're coming to help from neighboring states, but the weather is merciless.
"When the wind is blowing, helicopters can't be above and dropping water. There were 100 miles per hour winds, which we've never seen in California. Maybe you should be prepared, have some kind of battery-operated lamp, for example. We bought candles yesterday because we waited for the second day for the electricity to come back and it didn't. "And so we stayed by candlelight for the second night," Sonia Vasi said.