Firefighters are battling to contain at least five different conflagrations in the Los Angeles area, according to California fire officials speaking early Thursday. The largest of those fires erupted in the Palisades neighborhood in western Los Angeles on Tuesday and now covers more than 17,000 acres, while another raging through Eaton in the north has scorched 10,600 acres.
So far, five people have been reported dead and over 130,000 evacuated.
Prolonged drought, powerful winds and an exceptionally dry winter — extreme and unpredictable factors that the scientific consensus says is the result of climate change caused by human activity — have set the conditions for a wildfire that is perhaps the most destructive in state history. Homes, businesses, schools, local landmarks and, with them, people's livelihoods and cherished memories, have been wiped off the map.
More than 250,000 homes and businesses are now without power, and several neighborhoods near the fires have received "do not drink" orders for fear that tap water may have been contaminated by "debris and elevated turbidity."
According to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, more than 7,500 state, city and federal personnel are working to contain the disaster. Many of the frontline firefighters are prison inmates who work for a wage of just over $1 hour, at most. Winds howling at over 80 mph have caused fires to spread much faster than firefighters could handle through Tuesday and Wednesday.
With the wind calming slightly on Thursday morning, a battalion chief with Cal Fire told news outlets that his firefighters are using the window of opportunity to “start to build some containment"; due to the high winds on Tuesday and Wednesday, even minimal containment had been impossible. The winds are expected to pick up speed again in the afternoon, with renewed fire growth a distinct possibility.
Many Los Angeles residents are criticizing Mayor Karen Bass for not canceling a diplomatic trip to Ghana despite the National Weather Service in Los Angeles warning of "extreme fire weather conditions" since last Thursday. She returned to the city on Wednesday afternoon.
President-elect Donald Trump, for his part, blamed Newsom for the fires, writing on Truth Social that "one of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America is burning down to the ground," and that "this is all his fault!!!" due to inefficient water policies. Newsom responded by accusing Trump of "playing politics," while fact-checks and water management experts say that reports of firefighters running out of water are the result of a system put under strain by a disaster unprecedented in magnitude and scale rather than any state policy.
While Trump is also claiming that the "Green New Scam" (which was never made into law) is draining money away from relief and containment efforts, a range of critics from climate scientists to journalists say that policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions and regulate billion-dollar energy corporations are precisely what's needed to prevent even worse disasters in the future. They've been issuing the same warnings for the the greater part of the last decade now, as each year seems to promise even more danger than the last.
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