Mandatory evacuation orders for about a half-dozen communities in the San Bernardino National Forest remained in effect on Friday, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Other evacuation orders could be issued if the fires continued to expand, it said.

The blazes are among hundreds of separate wildfires burning from Alaska to Arizona as the U.S. West enters a wildfire season that experts fear could be especially destructive due to a crippling drought in California and parts of the Southwest and record-low snowpack in the Pacific Northwest.

The larger of the two blazes in Southern California, the Lake fire, had grown to 29,813 acres by early Friday and was 19 percent contained, according to the fire-tracking website InciWeb, which gathers information from multiple agencies.

More than 7,300 homes and structures were threatened and four firefighters have been injured battling the blaze, officials said.