Evacuation orders have reached as far as Santa Monica as a ferocious fire burns through five football fields a minute in Los Angeles.
Residents in the seaside city, west of downtown Los Angeles, have been urged to leave now due to the approaching Palisades fire.
The City of Santa Monica is alerting residents of an Evacuation Order for areas situated north of San Vicente. The order deems an immediate threat to life and mandates an urgent departure. The area has been marked as closed to public access by the city.
Devastating wind storm worsens conditions for LA wildfires
That refers to an area at the northwest edge of the city, bordering the Santa Monica Canyon.
In a neighboring zone, bordered by Montana Avenue and 26th Street, residents have been placed under an evacuation warning. This indicates a potential threat to life, prompting those requiring extra time to evacuate to leave promptly.
With numerous individuals already evacuating from the Palisades fire, attention has now turned to the Eaton fire. This new 161-hectare blaze has ignited in Altadena, located in eastern LA County, prompting additional evacuations.
Nine zones in the area are under evacuation orders, while five more are under evacuation warnings.
Adams said he had never witnessed anything like this in the 56 years he’s lived there.
He 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.
“It is crazy, it’s everywhere, in all the nooks and crannies of the Palisades. One home’s safe, the other one’s up in flames,” Adams said.
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.
“Standing in my driveway, getting ready to evacuate,” Woods said in the short video on X.
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 erratic weather caused Biden to cancel plans to travel to inland Riverside County, where he was to announce the establishment of two new national monuments in the state.
He remained in Los Angeles, where smoke was visible from his hotel, and was briefed on the wildfires.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved a grant to help reimburse California for the firefighting cost.
Film studios cancelled two movie premieres due to the fire and windy weather, and the Los Angeles Unified School District said it temporarily relocated students from three campuses in the Pacific Palisades area.
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.
Southern California hasn’t seen more than0.25 centimetres of rain since early May.
– With Associated Press, CNN
