- A brush fire erupted in Pacific Palisades amid a powerful windstorm that’s set to get stronger.
- The Palisades Fire quickly grew to more than 700 acres, prompting mandatory evacuations in the area.
- Local reports showed people abandoning cars and fleeing on foot amid traffic gridlock.
A major brush fire erupted in the Pacific Palisades, an affluent neighborhood of Los Angeles, in the first hours of a powerful windstorm on Tuesday.
The Palisades Fire broke out around 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time and quickly ballooned. By 3:30 p.m. PT the fire had spread across more than 1,200 acres and was still growing, authorities said at a press conference. The cause of the fire is still being investigated.
Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin M. Crowley said more than 25,700 people were threatened by the fire, as well as around 10,367 homes and 13,208 structures. The median home price in Pacific Palisades was $3.2 million as of November, according to Redfin.
Crowley said the fire was being fueled by strong winds and the surrounding topography, which were “making it extremely challenging” for firefighters on the scene.
No injuries had been reported as of Tuesday afternoon.
Mandatory evacuation orders were issued for the area all the way down to the Pacific Ocean.
“There’s no fire season, it’s fire year,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at the press conference Tuesday afternoon, noting other fires California has faced in recent months, including the Franklin and Mountain fires. “It’s year-round.”
Newsom encouraged residents to heed the evacuation orders. He also announced Tuesday that the state had secured federal assistance from FEMA to support the fire response.
Westwood Recreation Center was open to evacuees and their small animals as of Tuesday afternoon.
Live footage on ABC7 showed houses burning Tuesday afternoon.
The fire could spread further and grow stronger as extreme winds in the area are forecast to peak in the evening through Wednesday morning. As winds pick up, humidity is set to decrease.
“Just about everything is going to get worse before it gets better,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, said in a video update Tuesday afternoon.
Evacuees abandoned cars as traffic stalled
Palisades Drive, the major road out of the neighborhood, was packed with slow-moving lines of cars shortly after noon, as people evacuated beneath a smoky haze and bright-orange flames licked the hillside in the distance, shown live on ABC7.
The state agency CalFire reported that the fire was on both sides of Palisades Drive.
ABC7 spoke to multiple people who were evacuating on foot, including some who had abandoned their cars on the road.
One resident told the news channel that “a whole bunch of neighbors” were stuck in their homes on Palisades Drive.
“This is apocalyptic. We’ve had small fires, nothing like this,” the resident added.
Jonathan Vigliotti, a CBS News correspondent who was on the ground as a neighborhood went up in flames, said on X that there was “mass panic in the streets.”
Historic windstorm is ‘worst possible scenario’
Officials have not yet determined how the fire started, but it erupted during a high-risk major windstorm that created extreme fire conditions in the area.
Warm, dry Santa Ana winds from the deserts of Nevada and Utah are expected to bring gusts up to 100 mph to Southern California through Wednesday morning.
The National Weather Service called the windstorm “life-threatening and destructive” and warned that these could be the strongest north winds in 14 years.
With low humidity and dry vegetation in the region, the winds created a perfect storm for fire ignition. The NWS urged residents to be ready to evacuate, as such winds can rapidly spread any fire that breaks out.
“This is pretty much the worst possible scenario for a firefight,” David Ortiz of the LAFD told local news station KTLA.
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