LOS ANGELES — Firefighters scrambled to corral a fast-moving wildfire in the Los Angeles hillsides dotted with celebrity homes as a fierce windstorm hit Southern California on Tuesday. The blaze could be seen for miles as scores of residents abandoned their cars and fled on foot to safety as roads became blocked.
About 30,000 residents are under evacuation orders and more than 13,000 structures are under threat, said Kristin Crowley, fire chief of the Los Angeles. Fire Department.
California Governor Gavin Newsom said he saw “many structures already destroyed.” Officials did not give an exact number of structures damaged or destroyed in the blaze.
The cause of the fire was not immediately known, and no injuries had been reported, officials said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon.
Newsom warned residents across Southern California not to assume they are out of danger, saying the worst of the winds are expected between 10 p.m. Tuesday and 5 a.m. Wednesday.
Forecasters predicted the windstorm would last for days, producing isolated gusts that could top 160 kilometers per hour (100 miles per hour) in mountains and foothills — including in areas that haven’t seen substantial rain in months. The National Weather service said it could be the strongest Santa Ana windstorm in more than a decade across Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
Roughly half a million utility customers were at risk of their power being shut off to reduce the risk of the equipment sparking blazes.
In the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in western Los Angeles, a fire swiftly consumed about 5 square kilometers (2 square miles) of land, sending up a dramatic plume of smoke visible across the city. Residents in Venice Beach, about 10 kilometers (6 miles) away, reported seeing the flames. It was one of several blazes across the area.
Sections of Interstate 10 and the scenic Pacific Coast Highway were closed to all non-essential traffic to aid in evacuation efforts. Other roads were blocked. Some residents jumped out of their vehicles to escape the danger and waited to be picked up.
Resident Kelsey Trainor said the only road in and out of her neighborhood was completely blocked. Ash fell all around them while fires burned on both sides of the road.
“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. The road was just blocked, like full-on blocked for an hour.”
An Associated Press journalist saw the roof and chimney of one home in flames and another residence where the walls were burning. The neighborhood that borders Malibu about 32 kilometers (20 miles) west of downtown Los Angeles 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.
Long-time Palisades resident Will Adams said he had never seen a fire this low into the neighborhood in the 56 years he’s lived there.
“It is crazy, it’s everywhere, in all the nooks and crannies of the Palisades,” he said. “One home’s safe, the other one’s up in flames.”
Adams 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 on the electric poles.
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.
Actor Steve Guttenberg, who lives in the Pacific Palisades, urged people who abandoned their cars to leave their keys behind so they could be moved to make way for fire trucks.
“This is not a parking lot,” Guttenberg told KTLA. “I have friends up there and they can’t evacuate. … I’m walking up there as far as I can moving cars.”
The winds will act as an “atmospheric blow-dryer” for vegetation, bringing a long period of fire risk, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California, Los Angeles and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
“We really haven’t seen a season as dry as this one follow a season as wet as the previous one,” Swain said Monday.
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.
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