Five football fields a minute: How a perfect storm of extreme weather set off Los Angeles wildfires
Tens of thousands of Southern California residents have evacuated their homes as multiple wildfires continue to devastate the area, abandoning vehicles, property, and other possessions in their haste to escape the flames now spreading at a rate of about five football fields per minute.
In all, about 15,000 acres have been scorched by the flames.
“The smoke is a toxic soup,” Brian Rice, president of the statewide California Professional Firefighters union said on Wednesday, imploring tourists to stay out of the vicinity. “It’s not just the brush that’s burning, but homes are burning. Homes contain plastics that are built from petrochemical compounds. If you do not have to be in that area and breathe that environment in, don’t. It’s dangerous.”
Fire crews are operating at their “maximum limits,” Los Angeles City Fire Department Chief Christine Crowley told reporters.
“There’s not a fire department on the planet that could deal with this,” Glenn Corbett, a professor of fire science at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told The Independent.
Normally, fires burn vertically, according to Corbett, who previously served as assistant chief of the Waldwick, New Jersey FD. In this instance, he said, powerful winds, exacerbated by climate change, are pushing the flames along horizontally, “like a giant fan,” consuming everything in their path.
“They’re picking up burning debris and embers and depositing them downwind, and that’s the recipe for what we’ve got now. There’s nothing the fire crews can physically do to stop this fire. All they can do is try to get ahead of it and hope there are enough natural fire breaks, in the form of rivers, open areas with little vegetation, that maybe can slow it down a little bit. It’s virtually uncontrollable, and they go out, typically, only when they run out of fuel.”
Heavy traffic snarled roads in and out of the Pacific Palisades area of L.A., situated between Santa Monica and Malibu, forcing fire crews to bulldoze cars left behind by fleeing homeowners. Some 3,000 acres in the vicinity have so far gone up in smoke.
“We looked across and the fire had jumped from one side of the road to the other side of the road,” Palisades resident Kelsey Trainor told the Associated Press. “People were getting out of the cars with their dogs and babies and bags, they were crying and screaming.”
Actor Steve Guttenberg, of Police Academy fame, lives in the area and was seen lending a hand to firefighters near his home.
The Paradise Fire broke out around 10:20 a.m. Tuesday, and its exact cause remains under investigation. Several other blazes are simultaneously burning out-of-control, Cal Fire data showed: the Eaton Fire, which began Tuesday and has burned through 10,000 acres; the Hurst Fire, which also began Tuesday and has raced through 505 acres; and the Woodley Fire, which broke out on Wednesday and has burned up 75 acres of land. All remain zero percent contained at this time, Cal Fire said.
The Eaton Fire has claimed at least two lives, with more than 100 buildings destroyed, officials said Wednesday.
A fourth fire, which started on Wednesday in Riverside County, has eaten up about 15 acres and is 50 percent contained, according to Cal Fire. More than 150,000 homes in Los Angeles County are without power.
While the specific cause of the fires remains under investigation, the flames have been fed by the “tornado-like” Santa Ana winds, which have topped 100 mph in some parts and significantly hindered efforts by firefighters. The effect has been akin to that of an “atmospheric blow dryer,” according to UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, who said the unrelenting gusts have served to “dry things out even further.”
