A brush fire in a mountainous area north of Los Angeles ignited and spread quickly Thursday, forcing thousands of evacuations.

The Canyon Fire around Lake Piru in Ventura County rapidly grew to 600 acres amid scorching temperatures, low humidity and gusty winds. With over 4,400 wildfires and a quarter-million acres already burned in California this year,

A new wildfire was reported today at 4:05 p.m. in Los Angeles County, California. The wildfire has been burning on private land. At this time, there is no information on the containment of the fire and the cause of it remains undetermined.

The wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles earlier this year — burning entire neighborhoods to the ground, straining firefighting resources and forcing tens of thousands of people to flee their homes — may have led to hundreds more deaths than were recorded,

The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, estimated 440 "excess deaths" were attributable to the fires from January 5 to February 1, using models that compared predicted mortality under normal circumstances to actual numbers documented during that period.

Temperatures in the area are near 100 degrees and humidity as low as 15 percent. The southern part of California has seen very little rain, drying out vegetation and making it "ripe to burn," the National Weather Service (NWS) for Los Angeles warned.

The Gifford Fire has scorched more than 83,000 acres of California's Central Coast, becoming the state's largest wildfire of the year so far. The massive wildfire burning in eastern San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties was 9% contained as of Wednesday,