Sixth fire to break out in Los Angeles named as Sunset fire
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) has named a new brushfire in the Hollywood Hills the Sunset fire. According to Cal Fire, the Sunset fire currently encompasses 10 acres and broke out about 5.57pm.
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LA hasn’t seen anything like this before: Pacific Palisades residents react to wildfires – video
Sixth fire to break out in Los Angeles named as Sunset fire
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) has named a new brushfire in the Hollywood Hills the Sunset fire. According to Cal Fire, the Sunset fire currently encompasses 10 acres and broke out about 5.57pm.
Sixth fire breaks out in Los Angeles
Another brushfire has broken out in Los Angeles, this time in the Hollywood Hills.
“We have a new brush fire that has just broken out within the last five minutes in the Hollywood Hills,” LAFD fire chief Kristin Crowley announced at a press conference this afternoon, before excusing herself to respond to the event.
CBS News Los Angeles first reported the fire just after 5.30pm in the 2300 block of N Solar Drive.
Los Angeles schools to close on Thursday
All schools across the Los Angeles unified school district will be closed on Thursday, superintendent Alberto Carvalho announced at a press conference on Wednesday evening. In order to continue providing school meals to students who rely on them, he said, “we are activating eight different centers for the distribution of food to a grab-and-go product for students of Los Angeles Unified that will begin early tomorrow morning.”
He added that the district is preparing to locate students of schools that were damaged by the wildfires when schools resume in-person learning.
Newsom compares LA fires to deadliest wildfire in California history
Speaking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper in Altadena on Wednesday evening, California governor Gavin Newsom compared the wildfires current raging around Los Angeles to the Camp fire, the deadliest wildfire in state history which devastated the town of Paradise.
“Just complete and utter devastation, and I’ve been to a lot of these fires, a lot, going back to Paradise. This approximates Paradise,” he said. “It’s not numeric. It’s just the feeling – the sense of loss, place, belonging.”
Firefighters from across the west are aiding California in its fight against the Los Angeles area wildfires.
“At this time, the state of California is exercising their emergency compacts with the western states of Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Oregon and Washington for additional firefighting resources and personnel to come to Los Angeles county to assist us with this widespread fire emergency,” LA county fire chief Anthony Marrone said at a press conference this evening.
“One data point is that we have 60 units responding from Oregon, 45 units responding from Washington, 10 units responding from New Mexico, 15 units responding from Utah, and numerous units responding from Arizona.”
Matthew Cantor
Landing at LAX this afternoon was an uncomfortable experience.
Social media users have been posting upsetting photos of the flames as seen from the air as they landed. But as my flight from New York approached the city, visibility out my window was virtually zero, as if we were stuck in a cloud. Starting about an hour outside Los Angeles, there was significant turbulence, and many passengers around me were vomiting and one was in tears.
To add to the distress, once we were close to the city, alarms started going off. At first I almost panicked, assuming it was some sort of mechanical warning. But as the same sound continued at random intervals up and down the cabin, I realized it was just people’s phones warning of fire conditions. After about 45 minutes of jitters, we landed safely.
When I checked my email, I saw that 15 minutes after we’d taken off, the airline had offered anyone flying to LA the opportunity to change their booking for free.
More than 100,000 people are now under mandatory evacuations as wildfires continue to rage across southern California. As many as 1,500 structures, mostly homes and businesses, have been destroyed in the metropolitan area.
At a press conference this afternoon, Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass spoke about the devastation wrought by the wildfires proliferating across southern California, just hours after she returned from an international trip to Ghana.
“I stand here today with incredible sympathy and concern about the devastation and the tragedy that our city and county are facing, and I definitely want to send my condolences to the families and neighborhoods who lost property,” she said. “This firestone, firestorm is the big one in magnitude. Hurricane-force winds are usually accompanied by rain storms, but these are hurricane-force winds that are combined with extremely dry drought conditions.”
“I’ve been in constant contact with our fire commanders, with county, state and federal officials. I took the fastest route back, which included being on a military plane, which facilitated our communications, so I was able to be on the phone the entire time of the flight,” she added, speaking about her journey home after the fires broke out on Tuesday morning.
The Eaton fire burning north of Pasadena, California, has damaged or destroyed between 200 and 500 structures, Pasadena fire chief Chad Augustin said at a news conference on Wednesday afternoon.
Here’s more on the water situation.
As firefighters battled three wildfires raging across Los Angeles in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the water tanks supplying Pacific Palisades – where the largest of the fires broke out – ran dry.
Janisse Quiñones, chief engineer and CEO of the Los Angeles department of water and power, told reporters that by 3am Wednesday, the three 1m-gallon tanks serving the Palisades had been depleted.
“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades. We pushed the system to the extreme,” Quiñones said during an early Wednesday morning press conference. “Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”
