By Jorge Garcia and Mike Blake
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – More than 30,000 people evacuated their homes as a wildfire tore through a coastal area of Los Angeles in just a few hours, and a second blaze some 30 miles (50 km) inland was rapidly spreading on Wednesday.
Numerous buildings were destroyed and nearly 3,000 acres (1,200 hectares) were burned in the upscale Pacific Palisades area between the beach towns of Santa Monica and Malibu, officials said. The area is home to many film and music stars.
Highways were jammed with people fleeing the inferno as plumes of smoke and flames rose in the sky over Los Angeles on Tuesday night. The fires has not been contained by Wednesday morning and Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency
Pacific Palisades resident Cindy Festa said that as she evacuated, fires were “this close to the cars,” demonstrating with her thumb and forefinger.
“People left their cars on Palisades Drive. Burning up the hillside. The palm trees – everything is going,” Festa said from her car.
A fire official told local television station KTLA that several people were injured in the Palisades Fire, some with burns to faces and hands. One female firefighter had suffered a a head injury.
Hollywood actor James Woods said on X he was able to evacuate his Pacific Palisades house but added: “I do not know at this moment if our home is still standing.”
The second blaze, dubbed the Eaton Fire, broke out some 30 miles (50 km) inland in Altadena, near Pasadena, and increased in size to 1,000 acres (400 hectares) from 200 acres in a few hours, according to Cal Fire.
Almost 100 residents from a nursing home in Pasadena were evacuated, CBS News said. Video showed elderly residents, many in wheelchairs and on gurneys, crowded onto a smoky and windswept parking lot as fire trucks and ambulances attended.
Fire officials said a third blaze named the Hurst Fire had started in Sylmar, in the San Fernando Valley northwest of Los Angeles, prompting evacuations of some nearby residents.
More than 220,000 homes and businesses in Los Angeles county were without power late on Tuesday, data from PowerOutage.us showed.
PALISADES FIRE
Witnesses reported a number of homes on fire with flames nearly scorching their cars when people fled the hills of Topanga Canyon as the fire spread from there down to the Pacific Ocean.
Local media reported the fire had also spread north, torching homes near Malibu. Parts of Malibu and Santa Monica are under evacuation orders.
Multiple burn victims were treated after walking toward Duke’s restaurant in Malibu in the evening, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing a fire official.
Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley had earlier told a press conference that more than 25,000 people in 10,000 homes were threatened.
Firefighting aircraft scooped water from the sea to drop it on the flames as they engulfed homes. Bulldozers cleared abandoned vehicles from roads so emergency vehicles could pass, television images showed.
The fire singed some trees on the grounds of the Getty Villa, a museum loaded with priceless works of art, but the collection remained safe largely because nearby bushes had been trimmed as a preventive measure, the museum said.
Before the fire started, the National Weather Service had issued its highest alert for extreme fire conditions for much of Los Angeles County from Tuesday through Thursday.
With low humidity and dry vegetation due to a lack of rain, the conditions were “about as bad as it gets in terms of fire weather,” the service said.
Governor Newsom said the state had positioned personnel, firetrucks and aircraft elsewhere in Southern California because of the fire danger to the wider region.
The powerful winds changed President Joe Biden’s travel plans, grounding Air Force One in Los Angeles. He had planned to make a short flight inland to the Coachella Valley for a ceremony to create two new national monuments in California.
“I have offered any federal assistance that is needed to help suppress the terrible Pacific Palisades fire,” Biden said in a statement.
A federal grant had already been approved to help reimburse the state of California for its fire response, Biden said.
Actor Steve Guttenberg told KTLA television that friends of his were impeded from evacuating because others had abandoned their cars in the road.
“It’s really important for everybody to band together and don’t worry about your personal property. Just get out,” Guttenberg said.
“Get your loved ones and get out.”
(Reporting by Jorge Garcia, Mike Blake and Daniel Cole in Los Angeles and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California and Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Angus MacSwan)
Comments