4 fires that burned 120,000 acres of California are about to get more dangerous

Winds up to 80 mph are expected Thursday, making fire containment nearly impossible.

Four gargantuan fires are now burning around Los Angeles, and firefighters are bracing for hurricane-force winds Thursday that will more rapidly spread the flames, putting even more homes and lives at risk.

The blazes had already incinerated almost 120,000 acres as of Thursday morning, leaving behind scorched hillsides and smoke-shrouded highways in the state’s worst fire season ever.

Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency Tuesday after the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection reported four uncontained fires across Ventura County, home to 850,000, and Los Angeles County, with more than 10 million residents.

Wind speeds as high as 80 mph — in the range of a Category 1 hurricane — are expected today, according to forecasters.

"The forecast for [Thursday] is purple," Ken Pimlott, director at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, told NPR. "We've never used purple before."

You can see the locations of the fires in this map from the Los Angeles Times:

The fires have already forced more than 100,000 people from across the region to flee as embers skipped across highways, making a hellish commute for Angelenos.

Hundreds of schools in the region closed down because of the flames, and the University of California Los Angeles canceled classes Wednesday afternoon.

One blaze, the Creek Fire near Sylmar, has already burned more than 12,000 acres since it ignited in the darkness Tuesday morning, triggering evacuation orders affecting more than 120,000 people.

Meanwhile, the Thomas Fire in Ventura has forced 27,000 people to flee after consuming 96,000 acres and 150 structures. Officials report the fire is only 5 percent contained as of Thursday morning.

Farther north, 1,200 homes were evacuated as the Rye Fire torched 7,000 acres.

And the Little Mountain Fire in San Bernardino engulfed more than 260 acres, but officials repot that it is 100 percent contained as of Wednesday.

Firefighters also fully contained the Riverdale Fire, which scorched 40 acres after it was ignited Monday afternoon by a man fleeing from Riverside County sheriff’s deputies.

But new fires are still igniting. Flames from the Skirball Fire swiftly engulfed 150 acres near Sepulveda Pass Wednesday morning, shutting down the 405 Freeway and threatening multimillion-dollar homes in Bel Air.

Unusually stiff seasonal Santa Ana winds are driving the flames of the active fires over hills and through dry brush, making it almost impossible for the more than 1,000 deployed firefighters to contain the blazes.

"The prospects for containment really are not good. Mother Nature is going to decide when we have the ability to put it out, because it is pushing hard with the wind," Ventura County Fire Chief Mark Lorenzen said at a press conference Monday night.

This devastation has been years in the making, as Californians have kept building homes in high-risk areas. Meanwhile, record heat this summer following a wet winter left much of the state buried in dry kindling.

These blazes are coming after tens of thousands of Californians fled flames and smoke from the deadly record wine country fires in the northern part of the state last month. The United States as a whole has suffered the second-worst fire season on record, with more than 9.1 million acres burned this year so far.

Thick plumes of smoke from this week’s vast blazes wafted over the Pacific Ocean, casting a pall large enough for a NASA satellite to see.