A fast-moving wildfire erupted in Los Angeles county on Tuesday, quickly consuming nearly 3,000 acres and destroying homes in an affluent community along the Pacific Ocean.
Whipped by unusually strong winds, the fire prompted frenzied evacuations through winding roads in the Pacific Palisades, an area north of Santa Monica, with residents fleeing on foot as flames approached.
Late Tuesday evening, new evacuations were ordered in a different part of Los Angeles for an unrelated blaze. The Eaton fire started around 6.30pm PST in Altadena, at the base of the San Gabriel mountains, and quickly grew to threaten homes. By 8pm it had burned 200 acres, according to the California department of forestry and fire protection (CalFire).
A “life-threatening” windstorm is affecting a large swath of southern California, fanning the destructive fires and complicating early containment efforts. The region could be seeing the strongest winds in more than a decade, bringing extreme fire risk to areas that have been without significant rain for months.
Videos shared online from Pacific Palisades residents, including from the actor James Woods, show flames licking homes through the canyons, thrashing trees blowing in the winds and plumes of black smoke billowing into a cloudless sky. As the fire rapidly spread, severe gridlock on narrow streets led many to leave their cars, some which were subsequently engulfed in flames. With ditched vehicles blocking first responders, authorities were forced to use bulldozers to move cars.
The Palisades fire broke out around 10.30am and by 6.30pm had burned more than 2,900 acres, with the city of LA and the California governor, Gavin Newsom, declaring a state of emergency. Tens of thousands of people were under evacuation orders.
The blazes also reached the grounds of the Getty Villa, an art museum by the Malibu coast. Some vegetation on the property burned, but museum officials said no structures had been affected and that the galleries and staff were protected by a range of prevention measures.
The blazes also hit the grounds of the Palisades Charter high school, including its baseball field, and approached the beach in Malibu near the Pacific Coast Highway.
Southern California Edison shut off power to more than 28,000 customers as of Tuesday evening, according to the utility’s website. The shutoffs are meant to target areas where the conditions could lead to fires started by equipment.
The Los Angeles school district was also forced to relocate students from three campuses, Joe Biden had to reschedule plans for an event announcing two national monuments and movie premieres in Hollywood were canceled.
Actor Eugene Levy, the honorary mayor of Pacific Palisades, evacuated earlier on Tuesday, telling the Los Angeles Times while stuck in traffic, “The smoke looked pretty black and intense.” Other evacuees described harrowing escapes, one woman recounting to ABC7 how she abandoned her vehicle and fled with her cat in her arms: “I’m getting hit with palm leaves on fire … It’s terrifying. It feels like a horror movie. I’m screaming and crying walking down the street.”
Strong winds began hitting Los Angeles and Ventura counties on Tuesday and were likely to peak in the early hours of Wednesday, when gusts could reach 80mph (129km/h), the National Weather Service (NWS) said on Monday. Isolated gusts could top 100mph in mountains and foothills. The NWS called the extreme event a “particularly dangerous situation”, a rarely issued type of red flag warning, saying it was “as bad as it gets in terms of fire weather”.
“The worst and most severe part of this wind event is yet to come,” said the LA city council president, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, at a briefing around 4pm.
A large area of southern California, home to millions of people, is under what officials have described as “extreme risk” from the destructive storm. The weather service warned of downed trees and knocked over big rigs, trailers and motorhomes, and advised residents to stay indoors and away from windows.
Jeff Monford, a utility spokesperson, said it was not always possible to give advanced notice to customers, telling the Los Angeles Times: “This is a phenomenon of the increasing effects of climate change on weather. We have more weather extremes that can change more quickly than we might be accustomed to.”
The winds will act as an “atmospheric blow-dryer” for vegetation, bringing a long period of fire risk that could extend into the more populated lower hills and valleys, according to 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 during a Monday live stream, explaining that the abundant growth of vegetation combined with a severe wind event creates an elevated risk.
Newsom announced on Monday that his office would deploy resources around the region to respond to the storm, including moving fire crews and equipment from the north, where the fire season has come to an end, to southern California. He also secured assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“We are no strangers to winter-time wildfire threats, so I ask all Californians to pay attention to local authorities and be prepared to evacuate if told to go,” the governor said in a statement.
The Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, declared a state of emergency on Tuesday evening, saying on Twitter the designation would help clear a path for a rapid recovery.
The region has been experiencing warmer-than-average temperatures, in part due to recent dry winds, including the notorious Santa Anas.
Southern California has not seen more than 0.1in (0.25cm) of rain since early May. Much of the region has fallen into moderate drought conditions, according to the US Drought Monitor. Meanwhile, up north, there have been multiple drenching storms.
The fire risks are particularly extreme in the charred area left behind by the wind-driven Franklin fire in December, which damaged or destroyed nearly 50 homes in the Malibu area.
The blaze was one of nearly 8,000 wildfires that together affected more than 1,560 sq miles (more than 4,040 sq km) in California in 2024.
The last wind event of this magnitude occurred in November 2011, according to the NWS, during which more than 400,000 customers throughout LA county lost power for days, and there was significant damage in the San Gabriel Valley.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
