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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:
To give you an idea of how big some of these tornadoes are:
Smoke tornado taken today near Fallbrook https://t.co/sbnAe0UJeV via @chaparralian pic.twitter.com/2TLzwqsh3Y
— T. Loper (@t_loper) May 15, 2014
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