A hospital and hundreds of homes in California evacuated by a wildfire

Los Angeles-Sana

A widespread fire in Napa Valley county, in northern California, forced authorities to evacuate a hospital and hundreds of homes.

Reuters quoted a spokeswoman for Advantest Health Hospital in St. Helena County, USA, as saying that "all the 55 patients who were in the hospital were safely evacuated over the course of five hours yesterday," noting that the evacuation process associated with forest fires is the second of its kind in the hospital that includes 151 beds in about a month.

The blaze, which broke out east of Calistoga, north of San Francisco, was affected by strong winds, towards the nearby towns of Deer Park and St. Helena.

In turn, a spokesperson for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention indicated that orders had been issued to evacuate about 600 homes while alerting 1,400 other residents to "the necessity to prepare to flee at any moment", explaining that eviction notifications generally included about five thousand people.

About 1,200 acres of grassland hillsides and oak forests have come under fire, he said, after efforts to contain the fires failed.