California firefighters battled wind-fuelled wildfires that tore across the Los Angeles area, destroying homes, clogging roadways as tens of thousands fled and straining resources as officials prepared for the situation to worsen early Wednesday.
The flames from a fire that broke out Tuesday evening near a nature preserve in the inland foothills northeast of LA spread so rapidly that staff at a senior living centre had to push dozens of residents in wheelchairs and hospital beds down the street to a parking lot.
The residents waited there in their bedclothes as embers fell around them until ambulances, buses and even construction vans arrived to take them to safety.
Another blaze that started hours earlier ripped through the city’s Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, a hillside area along the coast dotted with celebrity residences and memorialized by the Beach Boys in their 1960s hit Surfin’ USA.
In the frantic haste to get to safety, roadways became impassable when scores of people abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot, some toting suitcases.
The traffic jam on Palisades Drive prevented emergency vehicles from getting through and a bulldozer was brought in to push the abandoned cars to the side and create a path. Video along the Pacific Coast Highway showed widespread destruction of homes and businesses along the famed roadway.
Pacific Palisades resident Kelsey Trainor said the only road in and out of her neighbourhood was blocked. Ash fell all around them while fires burned on both sides of the road.
‘They were crying and screaming’
“We looked across and the fire had jumped from one side of the road to the other side of the road,” Trainor said. “People were getting out of the cars with their dogs and babies and bags, they were crying and screaming.”
A third wildfire started around 10:30 p.m. PT and quickly prompted evacuations in Sylmar, a San Fernando Valley community that is the northernmost neighbourhood in Los Angeles. The causes of all three fires were under investigation.
Flames were being pushed by Santa Ana winds topping 97 kilometres per hour in some places. The winds were expected to increase overnight, producing isolated gusts that could 160 kilometres per hour in mountains and foothills — including in areas that haven’t seen substantial rain in months.
Thousands of buildings threatened
Officials didn’t give an estimate of structures damaged or destroyed in the Pacific Palisades wildfire, but they said about 30,000 residents were under evacuation orders and more than 13,000 structures were under threat. Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the scene and said many homes had burned.
By evening the flames had spread into neighbouring Malibu and several people there were being treated for burn injuries and a firefighter had a serious head injury and was taken to a hospital, according to Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Erik Scott.
Conditions were expected to worsen overnight. Just after midnight Wednesday, the Eaton fire, which started around 6:30 p.m. the day before, had quickly burned four square kilometres, according to fire officials.
“By no stretch of the imagination are we out of the woods,” Newsom warned residents, saying the worst of the winds were expected between 10 p.m. Tuesday and 5 a.m. Wednesday. He declared a state of emergency.
The fires were burning about 40 kilometres apart and it wasn’t known what started them.
As of Tuesday evening, nearly 167,000 people were without power in Los Angeles county, according to the tracking website PowerOutage.us, due to the strong winds.
Recent dry winds, including the notorious Santa Anas, have contributed to warmer-than-average temperatures in Southern California, where there’s been very little rain so far this season.
Southern California hasn’t seen more than 0.25 centimetes of rain since early May.
The Pacific Palisades fire started around 10:30 a.m. PT and quickly consumed about 11.6 square kilometres of land in the neighbourhood in western Los Angeles, sending up a dramatic plume of smoke visible across the city.
Firefighters worked to contain a fast-moving wildfire in the Los Angeles hillsides dotted with celebrity homes as a windstorm hit Southern California on Tuesday, fanning the blaze. Traffic out of the area was jammed as residents tried to flee, and forecasters warned the worst may be yet to come with the windstorm predicted to last for days.
Sections of Interstate 10 and the scenic Pacific Coast Highway were closed to all non-essential traffic to aid in evacuation efforts. But other roads were blocked. Some residents jumped out of their vehicles to get out of danger and waited to be picked up.
An Associated Press journalist saw a roof and chimney of one home in flames and another residence where the walls were burning. The Pacific Palisades, which borders Malibu about 32 kilometres west of downtown L.A., includes hillside streets of tightly packed homes along winding roads nestled against the Santa Monica Mountains and stretches down to beaches along the Pacific Ocean.
An AP photographer saw multimillion-dollar mansions on fire as helicopters overhead dropped water loads. Roads were clogged in both directions as evacuees fled down toward the Pacific Coast Highway while others begged for rides back up to their homes to rescue pets. Two of the homes on fire were inside exclusive gated communities.
Residents flee on foot
Longtime Palisades resident Will Adams said he was down in town when the fires started and immediately went to pick up his two kids from St. Matthews Parish’s school when he heard the fire was nearby. Meanwhile, he said embers flew into his wife’s car as she tried to evacuate.
“She vacated her car and left it running,” Adams said. She and many other residents walked down toward the ocean until it was safe.
Adams said he had never witnessed anything like this in the 56 years he’s lived there. He watched as the sky turned brown and then black as homes started burning. He could hear loud popping and bangs “like small explosions,” which he said he believes were the transformers exploding.
“It is crazy, it’s everywhere, in all the nooks and crannies of the Palisades. One home’s safe, the other one’s up in flames,” Adams said.
Actor James Woods posted footage of flames burning through bushes and past palm trees on a hill near his home. The towering orange flames billowed among the landscaped yards between the homes.
“Standing in my driveway, getting ready to evacuate,” Woods said in the short video on X.
The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency approved a grant to help reimburse California for the firefighting cost.
Some trees and vegetation on the grounds of the Getty Villa were burned by late Tuesday, but staff and the museum collection remain safe, Getty president Katherine Fleming said in a statement. The museum located on the eastern end of the Pacific Palisades is a separate campus of the world-famous Getty Museum that focuses on the art and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. The fire also burned Palisades Charter High School classrooms.
Film studios cancelled two movie premieres due to the fire and windy weather, and the Los Angeles Unified School District said it temporarily relocated students from three campuses in the Pacific Palisades area
