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The wildfires in California's San Diego county are scary enough -- "walls of flames," thousands of homes evacuated, new fires breaking out by the minute -- but now residents have a terrifying new threat: tornadoes of fire.

The high winds that have made the blazes so difficult to control and extinguish also caused fire whirls, or, as Mother Nature Network describes them: "a rare phenomenon in which fire forms a tornado-like vortex of flames." (emphasis added)

Via Fox 5:

There were also the slightly less scary but still pretty scary smoke tornadoes, via KGTV:

 
Post by 10News – ABC San Diego KGTV.

To give you an idea of how big some of these tornadoes are:

 

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