The Palisades Fire remains at 23,713 acres and is 17% contained, according to updated Cal Fire numbers this morning.
The Eaton Fire is at 14,117 acres and is 35% contained.
The Hurst Fire spans 799 acres and is 97% contained.
The newest addition, the Auto Fire, has burned through 56 acres and is zero percent contained.
A woman watches as crews battle the Auto Fire in Ventura yesterday.Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu via Getty Images
Damian Dovarganes / AP
The mural is by Sergei Statsenko, who uses the pseudonym Steeke for his art.
Damian Dovarganes / AP
Some 13 million people are under a “particularly dangerous situation” red flag warning today, meaning conditions are extremely high risk for rapid fire spread. The warning is in effect through tomorrow.
This Santa Ana wind event will peak this morning with gusts of 50-75 mph possible with relative humidity around 10-25%.
Locations at highest risk today include: Ventura, Oxnard, Camarillo, Westlake Village, Simi Valley, San Fernando, Fillmore and Pyramid Lake.
A firefighter monitors the spread of the Auto Fire in Oxnard yesterday.Etienne Laurent / AFP – Getty Images
Winds are forecast to weaken slightly this afternoon, with gusts of 40 to 55 mph, but the relative humidity will plummet 8 to 15%. Tonight into early tomorrow, winds will ramp back up to gusting 45 to 65 mph, with humidity of 10 to 25%.
The winds will lose strength late tomorrow morning into midafternoon. Though the winds are forecast to decrease tomorrow, a critical fire risk will remain in place.
Palisades Charter High School said its campus suffered “catastrophic damage on all sides” in the Palisades Fire that erupted last week.
While many of the facilities are intact, it’s estimated that more than 40% has been either damaged or destroyed. Access to campus has been limited due to damage and potential hazards such as asbestos, black carbon and toxins.
Yesterday, the school asked for assistance from the Los Angeles community “to help secure a temporary campus or shared space, ensuring that our students can maintain a sense of normalcy and stability in their lives.”
The school is seeking temporary classrooms or a campus for lease or donation, access to athlete practice areas in the vicinity and volunteers to help with moving, setup and coordination.
A firetruck drives past the Palisades Charter High School.Caylo Seals / Sipa USA via AP
The Auto Fire ignited overnight in Ventura County in the river bottom off North Ventura Boulevard, fire officials said.
Just after midnight, Ventura County Fire said forward progress was stopped. The cause of the blaze is under investigation and no structures were threatened.
The Auto Fire stretches 56 acres and is zero percent contained as of this morning, according to Cal Fire.
Erin Alexander, a firefighter of Newport Beach Fire Department, called the fires burning in Los Angeles, “some like I’ve never seen.”
“We put one fire out and another right down the way starting again. You have these houses that catch fire, that send off embers that catch other houses on fire. And we didn’t have enough water to put the fires out and it was … You know there is only so much you can do,” she told BBC News yesterday.
“Sometimes fast moving fires even. If a house catches on fire, we can get in there and put it out at some point and then they have something to get home to. But this fire burns so hot and so fast that it burned everything to ground and they have absolutely nothing to go back to,” she added on seeing homes ablaze.
Benjamin Fanjoy / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Reporting from LOS ANGELES
Thousands of students remain displaced without a school to go to in the Los Angeles area fires.
In the Pacific Palisades, the charred remains of an elementary school that burned down leaves eerie reminders of what once was: a burned out cubby with children’s lunch boxes still inside, covered in soot.
Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told NBC’s Liz Kreutz regarding students going back to school: “They’re going to be back in the classroom the latest Wednesday of this week. They will begin with necessary conversations about what these kids witnessed, and then the reassurances they need to hear that tomorrow is going to be okay.”
The superintendent said generally it takes a few years to build a school but officials will try to expedite that process, and the biggest challenge right now is removing hazardous debris.
While two elementary schools in the Palisades will be shifted to nearby campuses, it’s unclear where Palisades Charter High School, which teaches about 3,000 students, will find a temporary home.
“We’ve always looked forward to being able to go to high school together and then driving me to school every day, and now seeing that that’s gone and our school is gone is so devastating,” Palisades Charter High School freshman Lily Yadegar said.
She and her friends started a fundraising campaign to rebuild parts of campus that were burned.
Teacher Rick Steil, who lost his own home in the fire, said he’s heard from many pupils amid the devastation.
“I’ve heard from many of them. I mean, I cry every night, basically reading a text from one of them,” he said. “I’m trying to stay really positive, and I’ve taught my students to be that way in their life.”
With thousands of homes burned in the Palisades and Eaton fires, so many families have lost so much. But with help from a few firefighters, one Altadena family was reunited with one of their most prized possessions. KNBC’s Alex Rozier reports.
Reporting from LOS ANGELES
Southern California is braced for “extremely critical fire conditions” caused by a new period of Santa Ana winds today through Wednesday across parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, as the battle to contain rampant blazes goes on. NBC News’ Jay Gray reports.
Oregon’s state fire marshal said none of its engines were turned away and that they all passed their safety checks, after some social media posts claimed they had to be turned away from California due to not passing emission tests.
“TO BE CLEAR: THIS IS FALSE,” it said in a statement on X. “No engine was turned away.
The state has sent a total of 21 strike teams, 15 of which arrived in Southern California on Thursday and the fire marshal said they began operating on Friday morning for their 24-hour shift with “no delay in the process or travel.”
The fire marshal said the equipment had gone through routine safety checks at Sacramento with Ca lFire to “make sure the engines are mechanically sound.”
“The equipment also does not regularly travel hundreds of miles at a time. Firefighter safety is our number one priority,” it added.
Animal rescuers are now responding to the devastating fires in Southern California, helping out animal shelters in the fire zones as they prepare for an influx of animals. KSBW Reporter Felix Cortez spoke to two Monterey County agencies getting involved.
Benjamin Fanjoy / Bloomberg via Getty Images
An air tanker drops a large payload of flame retardant on the Eton fire in Altadena yesterday. A sign closing a trail at Mandeville Canyon is covered in the bright chemical substance as fire crews continue to battle raging fires across the city.
Valerie Macon / AFP via Getty Images
Vehicles and homes are left coated in retardant as many neighborhoods remain cut off to residents in Mandeville Canyon.
Valerie Macon / AFP via Getty Images
Agustin Paullier / AFP – Getty Images
While many connections have been restored, there are still more than 80,000 energy customers without power following the wildfires of the last week, according to PowerOutage.us.
More than half of these are in Los Angeles county while 20,000 are in neighboring Ventura County.
The National Weather Service said a rare “Particularly Dangerous Situation” Red Flag warning for fire will begin in the next several hours, which is issued “only for most extreme events.”
The warning was issued for “extremely rare and dangerous” fire weather conditions that have previously resulted in large and deadly fires, with extremely low humidity and damaging winds expected.
Risks include “extreme fire behavior and very rapid growth,” downed trees and power outages.
Joe Thompson’s desperate post-wildfire scramble to find a new place for his family to live led him Saturday to a five-bedroom home in Santa Monica, California, that had been put on the market the day before for $28,000 a month — more than double the rent posted a year ago. The agent was asking for three months’ rent up front and already had applications from multiple people.
Thompson and his partner turned away, appalled.
“We’re not going to do that,” Thompson, 44, a trader and investor, said later. “We’ll just keep looking.”
The couple and their two young children were displaced last week. Although their house was left standing, they don’t know the extent of the damage or when they will be allowed back. So they have joined thousands searching for housing in a city that had a dire shortage before the disaster.
The stampede has resulted in some homeowners and property managers jacking up prices on short-term rentals, including dozens that appear to violate a California law against increasing prices by more than 10% during a state of emergency, according to a review of Zillow listings and interviews with real estate agents, housing advocates and home-seekers.
Authorities have asked residents to report gouging to the state Attorney General’s Office.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued an executive order yesterday to help residents rebuild homes lost in the fires, saying it would clear away the bureaucracy involved.
“This order is the first step in clearing away red tape and bureaucracy to organize around urgency, common sense and compassion,” she said in a statement.
The order includes creating a task force for debris removal, as well as a “one-stop-shop” to issue permits, waive certain review processes and expedite building inspections.
Mario Tama / Getty Images
Yet another period of strong downslope offshore Santa Ana winds is ramping up this morning, the same phenomenon that caused the wildfires that have devastated communities across the greater Los Angeles area.
The National Weather service said in an update yesterday that winds could gust anything up to 75 mph today in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, possibly bringing down trees and power lines.
“The greater concern however will be the strength of the winds when combined with very dry relative humidities and dry fuels. This combination will result in extremely critical fire weather conditions, as forecast by the Storm Prediction Center,” the NWS said.
“Not only will these extreme and dangerous conditions make fighting ongoing fires much more difficult, but these will make new ignitions much more likely. New fires that do develop will have the potential to grow and spread rapidly, adding to the danger of the situation.”
Reporting from ALTADENA, California
ALTADENA, Calif. — Dennis “Buzz” Chatman said that, when he bought his house in Altadena in 2020, the original property title in 1950 indicated that the only nonwhite people allowed in the neighborhood were servants.
“So being able to plant my flag there meant a lot,” Chatman, a film and TV producer, said.
Now, he’s grappling with having lost not only his house, but what he says was a haven for Black families to the devastating fires in Los Angeles last week.
Video footage provided by the Ventura County Fire Department showed firefighters battling a brush fire in Ventura County, California. According to their social media post, they are actively working to stop the fire’s forward spread amid strong winds.
Deadly wildfires continue to ravage the Los Angeles area, as firefighters battle windy conditions to contain the out-of-control blazes.
But what does it mean to “contain” a wildfire?
Containment does not mean that a blaze has been completely extinguished. Rather, it refers to how much of a perimeter has been established around an active fire, preventing it from growing and engulfing more land.
