Palisades burning: Inside the worst wildfire in L.A. history | About That

La is on fire apocalyptic scenes tens of thousands on the run as homes and buildings burn to the ground I mean this is what's so crazy if you you can't even see the sun it is completely blacked out Flames are up about 30 40 ft high and you know you hear pop pop pop sound like a war zone several Wildfire struck in quick succession in the Pacific Palisades Pasadena the San Fernando Valley Beverly Hills what you see here is roughly where those fires have been burning now look at the evacuation zones thousands of people have had to flee for their lives at least five people have been killed and more than 100,000 and now under evacuation orders I mean I was down to my knees when I got up to my parents house which was basically just a chimney stack and a pile of Ash I mean it's something out of a movie at one point more than a million people were without power the air has become too poisonous to breathe the water unsafe to drink and the biggest fires are still complet completely uncontained we're still looking at 10,600 Acres out here in Altadena and in Pasadena and up in these Hills who knows where that will go next but one fire the first to break out and still the biggest by far is unprecedented no one in La has ever seen a fire there so big growing so fast and fighting that fire has been a nightmare out of every fire hydrant you've seen what have you found right now we're finding most of them are down or Loc pressure if you had a hydrant for this building if we had a hydrant for this building we might have been able to save the back out I'm going to explain everything we know about the Palisades fire and why firefighters can't stop [Music] it the National Weather Service issues a Red Flag Warning when it's warm windy and dry three things that can kick wildfires into overdrive and Tuesday Morning those warnings became very real you can see the Flames are burning in the Hills this fire appears to have started in the Foothills just north of the Pacific Palisades themselves the Palisades if you've never been there is this sort of idilic community very secluded well outside the hustle and bustle of downtown LA itself nestled between the Pacific Ocean the mountains to the north Malibu is to the West Santa Monica is to the east a lot of celebrities live there and once celebrity actor James Woods would be among the first to post video of the fire approaching his home standing in my driveway getting ready to evacuate we've got a lot of planes going over dropping water he posted that just before noon local time within about an hour of the fire starting only a few hours later with the caption two houses from us a short video of a neighbor's home being consumed the first major problem almost everyone would have run into was figuring out how to escape once you got the call ordering you to they played this voicemail live on KTLA 5 evacuate now from the area of Palisades area those not in the evacuation area should shelter in place evacuation order for Palisades fire but this was what it looked like when you're not quite sure whether you're driving away from or into danger now I've geolocated this video to exactly this stretch of Palisades Drve Kelsey trainer the evacuee who shot the video she's heading south along Palisades and heading towards Sunset Boulevard but you can see the geography of the part of the Palisades that she was coming from there are no options you are literally surrounded by mountains which are on fire and Palisades Drve is the only way out from her follow-up post there is also only one Road in and out of this area and this was the road nowhere else to go this is the emergency route which is your house yeah this is our house backyard's on fire I'm out of here oh my gosh so what happened is there anything we could do to help you sir uh you can take these paintings I guess I can't ride with these I've seen accounts of it taking some people hours just to leave their neighborhoods because so many people were trying to leave all at once even if you had a car you might have been tempted to ditch it and go on foot because of the gridlock and this is what lots of people did and and that created a new problem permanent unmoving gridlock which makes responding to an emergency [Music] impossible so this is what county Crews had to spend their time doing literally bulldozing dozens of cars out of the way all of them left abandoned but the evacuation was just one problem the wind and the water were two others Southern California has been facing incredibly dry conditions lately in January that's winter it's supposed to rain a lot but they've gotten almost nothing for months LAX has their driest start to the water year on record and Records date back to 1944 so when the Palisades fire did spark and Embers started to fly dry brush provided Fuel and the wind provided an Unstoppable push high pressure Over the Rockies low pressure is going to be part of this Coast to Coast storm system and that's funneling in the Santa Ana winds according to Pasadena's fire chief the wind was the number one factor causing the fire to spread so quickly and that happens in two ways one The Burning hot Embers from the Wildfire the wind blows them far and wide and they start new fires according to the LA fire department sometimes miles ahead of the flame front they're trying to throw the hose Up on the Roof so they could start to spray the palm tree itself but as you see pieces are falling down but the wind also made it impossible for water bombers to fly at all by the evening on the day the Palisades fire started all firefighting aircraft were grounded it was simply too dangerous to fly hurricane Forest winds are usually accompanied by rainstorms but these are hurricane Forest winds that are combined with extremely dry drought conditions but if the wind was what made the Wildfire so deadly it was the lack of water that made them impossible to fight we had a tremendous Demand on our system in the Palisades we pushed the system to the extreme four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight one of the biggest stories to come out of the Palisades Wildfire is how the city's water supply failed to meet the moment you see there are three water tanks these huge million gallon tanks that firefighters in that area can draw upon the hydrants are connected to those three tanks and many of them sputter dry within 15 hours we ran out of water in the first tank at about 4:45 p. m. yesterday we ran out of water on the second tank about 8:30 p.

m. and the third tank about 3:00 a. m.