The flames came from all sides, tearing across cliffs and roaring down mountains, burning through homes and engulfing cars. Entire communities were evacuated, forcing people to grab what they could and flee as raging wildfires spread rapidly across Southern California on Wednesday.
Yet even as they scrambled for shelter from the choking smoke and flames that turned idyllic communities into apocalyptic backdrops, many worried about the dangers still to come. Officials warned that the wildfire threat could increase through the end of the week, with the same weather conditions fueling the fires forecast to intensify.
The wildfires in Ventura and Los Angeles counties have so far forced tens of thousands to escape, destroying hundreds of structures and emptying homes, hospitals, schools and multimillion-dollar mansions alike. Some 100,000 acres have burned.
In Ventura, the Thomas Fire burned across 90,000 acres on Wednesday, spreading through an area larger than the city of Detroit. Officials there said they had evacuated more than 50,000 people from 15,000 homes.
Late Wednesday, several areas east of the city of Santa Paula were placed under mandatory evacuation due to imminent danger, according to news release by the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office. The areas included much of northern Ojai.
Los Angeles County faced comparatively smaller blazes in the Rye and Creek fires, both of which erupted Tuesday north of downtown Los Angeles.
A new blaze, known as the Skirball Fire, began early Wednesday in Bel Air, temporarily shutting down Interstate 405 — one of the country’s busiest freeways — and forcing the evacuation of 1,200 homes across the posh hillside neighborhoods near the University of California Los Angeles campus. Officials confronted that growing fire while continuing to battle the Creek Fire, which had crept into the city on the other side of town.
But by late Wednesday, strong winds caused new flare-ups in the Bel Air area, Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Peter Sanders said at a 10 p.m. news conference. Firefighters made late night water drops from helicopters in hopes of keeping the fire from jumping west of Interstate 405.
Los Angeles officials said that 265 schools in the San Fernando Valley and West Los Angeles would be closed for the rest of the week as a safety measure.
The fires in Southern California went from 0 to 30,000 (acres) in a matter of hours fueled by the Santa Ana winds. These winds, also dubbed the Diablo (Devil) Winds, are hot, dry, and ferocious. They can whip a small brush fire into a raging inferno in just hours. This is exactly what Southern California experienced on Monday night (Dec. 4). Thousands of residents found themselves evacuating when the Thomas Fire suddenly pushed into Ventura by the Santa Ana winds. These horrific winds are expected to continue through the end of the week making firefighting more difficult and much more dangerous. Winds in the area could reach 70 mph and this would have a devastating effect on the fire's movement. The fire has consumed over 50,000 acres at present as it jumped over Highway 101 and moved towards the Pacific Ocean. Hundreds of homes and structures have been destroyed in this latest round of wildfires in California. Per the National Weather Center red flag conditions are expected to continue through the end of the week. This current round of Diablo Winds has been the longest and strongest wind event recorded this season.
NASA's Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, MODIS, instrument on Dec. 05, 2017. Actively burning areas (hot spots), detected by MODIS’s thermal bands, are outlined in red. Each hot spot is an area where the thermal detectors on the MODIS instrument recognized temperatures higher than background. When accompanied by plumes of smoke, as in this image, such hot spots are diagnostic for fire.
Officials in Ventura said they expected the fire to grow to the north and west over the next two days, as well as what one Cal Fire official, Tim Chavez, said was a “large probability of spot fires that will spread easily and spread rapidly.”
In Los Angeles, officials said they were bracing for another night of extremely strong winds as high as 80 miles per hour, which, combined with dry weather and parched vegetation, made the region particularly vulnerable to new fires. At an afternoon news conference, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Ralph M. Terrazas said the winds could blow embers as far as 10 miles away. The index that the department uses to assess environmental conditions for the fire risk is at the highest level he has ever seen in his career, Terrazas said.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell was one of many officials who urged residents in areas near the fires to prepare to evacuate “should the need arise.”
Not far from the Skirball Fire, residents and visitors alike were weighing whether to stay or go. Two roommates who live in the Brentwood area packed their bags and were “just hanging tight,” said one of the men, 23-year-old Wes Luttrell. Montevis Price, who was visiting Los Angeles from Miami, promptly checked out of his hotel when he saw the blaze.
“I saw the little mountain on fire and that was it,” Price said. “You can prepare for a hurricane, but you can’t prepare for something that happens all of a sudden.”
California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) declared states of emergency in Los Angeles and Ventura counties because of the fires. More than 4,000 firefighters and other first responders fanned out across the region to save lives, protect homes and evacuate residents.
Los Angeles County Fire Department Chief Daryl L. Osby said that many of the firefighters who had been working on the fire since Monday had not slept. Hundreds of other firefighters and engines were en route from Northern California and nearby states.
“You can probably understand that most of our resources are pretty tapped,” he said.
As of Wednesday evening, officials said no deaths had been recorded as a result of the blazes, but some areas that had burned were not yet accessible.
The scenes of areas around the fires in Los Angeles brought to mind the horror of a disaster film. Day appeared as night along the coast, the smoke-masked sun casting a deep red light into the sky. Massive flames rolled down chaparral-covered cliffs toward Highway 101 from Santa Barbara south to Ventura. On the 405 highway near the J. Paul Getty Museum, videos taken from cars passing through showed a hellscape of fire and darkness: black hillsides covered in smoke and burning embers. Palm trees, a symbol of the region’s laid-back lifestyle, went up in flames.
The smoke from the fires was visible from space, according to photos taken on the International Space Station and posted by NASA.
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