Los Angeles plunged into its worst natural disaster in decades as wildfires driven by hurricane-strength wind gusts tore through prosperous neighborhoods, killed at least five people and forced more than 100,000 residents to flee.
Even as firefighters struggled to contain two massive fires — one in the tiny coastal enclave of Pacific Palisades, the other bearing down on Pasadena — a new blaze flared up in the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday evening, prompting evacuations.
The latest mandatory evacuation order encompasses a densely populated area and includes major landmarks such as the Hollywood Bowl, Dolby Theater and TCL Chinese Theater, extending to a section of Hollywood Boulevard. Parts of Beverly Hills were under an evacuation warning.
U.S. President Joe Biden cancelled a planned trip to Italy late Wednesday, just hours before he was set to depart, citing the need to help monitor the response to the Los Angeles-area fires.
The offshore winds that have fanned the flames with gusts above 129 kilometers per hour were expected to last through Thursday, and another wind storm could follow next week, with no rain in between.
The fires, which burned more than 10,500 hectares by Wednesday evening, upended life in America’s second-largest city. Schools and roads closed, homes and businesses lost power, air quality plummeted, and thousands of displaced residents searched for hotel space or sought shelter from friends and family.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called the disaster the "big one.”
"I’ve have seen the front lines of the Palisades fire, and it is staggering,” she said during a Wednesday evening news conference.
Not since the 1994 Northridge Earthquake had a disaster affected so many lives across the city at once. In the Palisades, multimillion-dollar homes burned as firefighters drew more water from hydrants than the system could supply — tapping them dry and forcing the city to bring in mobile tanks.
Flames edged closer to seaside Malibu, where residents faced the possibility of fleeing a wildfire for the second time in a month. Virtually the entire community of Altadena was under mandatory evacuation orders from the Eaton fire, which erupted Tuesday evening at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains and soon swelled past 4,290 hectares.
The full economic impact won’t become clear until the flames are contained. But AccuWeather estimated damages and economic losses at $52 billion to $57 billion, saying it could become the worst wildfire incident in California history, given the number of structures that could be burned. While the state has endured a series of deadly blazes in recent years, most have struck rural areas or smaller cities — not a metropolis of more than 12 million.
"These fires are stretching the capacity of emergency services to their maximum limits,” said Los Angeles City fire Chief Kristin Crowley at a news conference Wednesday.
Authorities have not yet determined what caused each of the five fires that erupted around the city Tuesday and Wednesday as the wind storm intensified.
But stock in the area’s largest investor-owned electric utility — Edison International’s Southern California Edison — sank Wednesday as investors questioned whether the company’s equipment played some role. The utility said that the Palisades fire wasn’t in its territory, but it was reviewing its operations around the Eaton and Hurst wildfires.
California has a long history of wildfires sparked by power lines in high winds, and Edison has shut off electricity to more than 170,000 local homes and businesses, hoping to prevent ignitions.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection reported an ignition point for the Eaton fire that is below Edison transmission lines, an analyst with Jefferies Financial Group said in a report Wednesday. "Investors remain nervous from our conversations given the lack of containment with a ‘sell first, ask questions later’ mindset,” lead utility analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in the report. The company’s shares dropped as much as 10% Wednesday, the most since March 2020.
Some residents fled to second homes at getaways like Joshua Tree and Palm Springs. Others found a bed in Red Cross shelters. Not every escape was secure.
Todd Sammann fled his Pacific Palisades home Tuesday to spend the night with his wife’s parents, but got little sleep because fire threatened their home in Pasadena.
"I was up most of the night tracking the Eaton Canyon fire,” Sammann said in a text. "We were instructed to be ready to evacuate if the wind shifted. Thankfully, the winds died down significantly here, so we were able to stay put.”
Even Angelenos far from the fire lines found their lives affected. Museums, theme parks, farmer’s markets and restaurants closed their doors. The Los Angeles Kings hockey team postponed their game planned for Wednesday evening in downtown Los Angeles, while a Lakers basketball game Thursday hung in the balance.
And with the possibility of further fires, many faced the prospect of needing to flee at a moment’s notice. At one point Wednesday, a small fire erupted in the heart of the densely populated San Fernando Valley, although firefighters quickly stopped its advance.
Dry Santa Ana winds will continue to whip down from the mountains through Friday, said Nick Nauslar, fire science and operations officer for the U.S. Storm Prediction Center. Those gusts could still fuel dangerous fire behavior if any blazes are active, even if they’re weaker than what Los Angeles has had to cope with so far.
"Given the amount of fire we have on the ground, any Santa Ana conditions are going to prove problematic for firefighters and the public in terms of fire spread,” Nauslar said, adding that another round of dry winds could be coming early next week. "People need to stay aware and stay ready.”
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