How the LA wildfires unfolded and what’s needed for recovery | BBC News

Devastation comes to California all right dude yeah let's get out of here residents Flee for their lives all there's nothing we can do now bro we had everything like the sentimental things like my mom passed away we I had only a few things of hers left oh the stuff that's here is replaceable people are not so so having the family is the most important thing homes are destroyed on an unprecedented scale people would normally be driving up and down here with surfboards on top of their cars ready to enjoy a day at the beach but

right now it just looks like some sort of Apocalypse firefighters struggle to hold back the Flames all 29 fire departments in our County are not prepared for this type of widespread disaster but how did it happen and why did the fires spread so [Music] quickly Los Angeles is America's biggest city on the west coast and people here are used to wildfires they've destroyed homes and businesses time and time again but no one could have predicted the scale of the tragedy about to unfold when news first broke of one fire in one Community you can see

they are dropping water they just there you go you can see it happen right there and there are some hand Crews on the ground would you mind talking to us for a second okay what's what's your name uh Charles Charles Charles have you been evacuated from the area or not yet not yet not yet and we have seen that before so nothing new to us for the last 32 years that have been here within hours things are getting serious residents can scarcely believe their eyes fires were this close to the cars people their cars on

Palisades Drive yeah burning up the hillside palm trees everything's going what happened there's a lot of fire right there that's why the people coming we leave the car they said to get out of your car okay it's just so sad and I feel for everyone that's lost property and buyes I've never been this close to it driving down the canyon was really very very shattering huge smoke plumes can be seen Rising above the Pacific Palisades area of the city and residents have been issued with an evacuation order please take this wind emergency very seriously as

you heard uh from the speakers before me this is something that is going to get worse throughout the night so we all have to look out for each other the fire broke out around 10:30 in the morning in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood it's an upscale area between Santa Monica and Malibu home to many famous residents sitting here and waiting to find out whether we're going to be evacuated or not is it's like the time can't go by any slower yes baby come here Bubba so instead we decided to pass the time by putting together bags

of clothes for our friends who have lost everything I have never seen Flames from my house like this ever this is insanity I hope everyone is staying safe tonight lots of love lots of prayers okay we found everyone just packing up the car getting ready to go to the hotel it's so big it's so red my thoughts and prayers are with everyone tonight I'm reallying stop [Music] soon our community is beyond tated we are all pulling together a lot of my friends at WS are home I'm waiting to see it our home will be there

um right now it's it's just it's just a winning game among the buildings threatened the world famous gy museum with 44,000 [Music] artifacts I have the waves crashing in front of me here on PCH and I have the fles behind me here on the hill after coming off at tascal Canyon where Embers were being blown around as you saw the high school caught fire Halles burning on either side and that fire over the last few hours just I mean look at the gust dust right now it's literally pushing it's blowing South so it is just

throwing these ples over these Hills and through these Canyons [Music] the headlines 30,000 people have been ordered to evacuate their homes because of a wildfire which is tearing through wealthy suburbs of Los Angeles it's like a ghost town everybody's abandoned this place as you can imagine and the fires are still smoldering people would normally be driving up and down here with surfboards on to of their cars ready to enjoy a day at the beach but right now it just looks like some sort of Apocalypse there's not enough structure protection in here to really try and

save all of these homes it's really going to be a struggle this is heartbreaking I feel for these people and it's just sad to watch all these homes go up this was uh just a little antique shop uh pizza place uh these places have been here forever ever since I've been alive I really thought my shop was gone it's still here right now I I don't know if it'll make it or not there's a lot of uh people who don't have insurance or fire insurance I know that's difficult in this area especially if you're in

the fire zone and I feel horrible for them tell you I've been here 47 years I grew up on this block I saw the other ALG fires and it was nothing like this nothing like this my son left the house before us on foot he doesn't have a cell phone or anything like that so I'm searching for him now I'm looking for him we got a phone call from a neighbor saying that our house was on fire and we knew that there were no fire trucks in the area um so we thought we would come

up and see if we could get in the area well I keep going from not crying to now starting to cry again because I know a lot of these people and they've lost everything so it's it's pretty surreal to see all this 5 minutes ago I sitting in the car by myself and I just the tears just came over my face so and entire history is is is in the house we did take all of our family pictures and a few valuable paintings out last night so you know uh all the stuff that's here is

replaceable people are not so very lucky so happy the family is the most important thing I I I I'm going to break down again that's what I that's what I feel it's it's my whole life everything was in there so lost everything you shape up you're supposed to be a support anyway yeah I'm okay I'll be okay I'm tough and we'll start over even even even though I'm 91 years old I'll start over again the difference with this is that we've had these huge 50 to 80 mph winds and it's still windy and so didn't

matter where the fire started yesterday but the Embers flew everywhere let's go back to Emma vardy now and Emma this area is no stranger to wildfires but nothing could have prepared them for this what makes this so different is that there are so many fires burning at once and they're burning so close to residential areas now emergency crews on the ground have admitted they just don't have enough people to deal with this developing situation and some of those fires are still growing in size the hillsides still burning behind us and every time the winds blow

there's a gust of wind we just seeing Flames up on the hillside there burst back into life a reminder of how unpredictable this fire is and how much the winds have been driving it and making life so difficult we have also been hearing about some serious injuries to Residents who did not evacuate their homes choosing uh to stay behind for various reasons to try and protect their homes or simply leaving it too late so emergency services are continuing to warn people to take evacuation orders very seriously because this is a day like Los Angeles has

not seen before and it's not even close to being over yet this is CBS news on the hour the Southern California wildfires are not only some of the most destructive in State history they've turned deadly at least five lives now reported lost overnight destruction continued 15,000 buildings had been burned and 100,000 people had been forced from their homes firefighters were overwhelmed and there were increasing reports of looting so if I very quickly take my mask off the air is absolutely thick with smoke the fire Crews here tell us they have a shortage of water and

in many instances they're having to stand and watch these properties burn it is a losing battle I never thought I would come through here David was hoping his home might have survived but the whole neighborhood has gone and with it his house too I would have thought I'd be seeing more planes flying over with water I mean there appears to been just two I mean in California are are there not like 20 or 30 of them that they could have got you already um I I would have thought the firemen would like take a stand

on a certain area maybe they did and and I'm just not seeing it but from Pacific Palisades the fire spread across more than 177,000 Acres making it one of the biggest natural disasters in the history of Los Angeles five separate fires were now burning the Palisades and heurst fires were almost completely uncontained we've just been evacuated we've just been evacuated from this good Samaritan's car you got it Dad moving out vulnerable residents was proving far from Easy there's a fire right right outside our car we got it no not that way Dad Dad my father-in-law

has Parkinsons he can barely move this was a heroic effort on his part very wobbly here let me try to get you home which way do I go this way Dad to the sidewalk I went outside I saw smoke and fire near my father-in-law's house and realized we need to go the problem is we didn't have a car I ran up and down the the street where he was Glenn Haven finally found a neighbor who was willing to swing by and pick us up most people had already gone at that point and at that point

I I grabbed his medicine that's the only thing I could think to grab turn around out we got this and at that point we jumped in his car this guy Jeff uh neighbor we'd never met before but you know salt of the earth saved Our Lives as we're driving down there's fires on both sides of the car we're driving we're suddenly seeing fires you could feel the heat and then the fires were getting closer and closer and at that point just being stuck there surrounded by fire these uh the policemen started running up the street

get out of the car get out of the [Music] car the authorities in Los Angeles have issued a powerful warning against looting and other criminal activity in areas abandoned by people fleeing wildfires 10 people are known to have died but officials expect this number to rise on day four of the disaster tens of thousands of Acres have been destroyed residents are asking why help wasn't coming more quickly it's just not enough crws you don't enough people I think what I think I think they're under B I think budgets have been [Music] cut we actually came

to say thank you to our house for being good to us and we were good to it well as thousands of firefighters continue that battle to get this crisis under control this is what it leaves in its wake the suburb of Altadena sits at the foot of a mountain range over which the unusually strong winds for this time of year the Santa Ana winds they call them poured in on Tuesday night and it's that that really lies at the part of this disaster the Santa an winds have had two effects once you get the fire

going well it's already started but the Santa Ana winds adding extra dry air that sucks out all the moisture that's already there in the plants so it dries them out quicker so it's actually adding more fuel and then the speed helps the spread if you think you can have wind speeds basically hurricane force wind speeds blowing with a fire in place it will push that flame that boundary of the fire over huge areas in such a short space of time and that is what we've seen in La over the last few days there's much debate

about the emergency response were the authorities prepared for such a Calamity but there's also another question people are asking is the changing climate partly to blame for all the devastation so what the climate scientists say is that the temperature is getting hotter that's making things drier you've got extended heat waves which draw moisture out of the soil and out of the vegetation so you've got more dry vegetation so when a fire starts there's more fuel to keep that fire going and it's likely to burn longer and burner a larger area the national oceanographic and Atmospheric

Administration did a paper looking at the relationship between temperature increase and wildfires they found that climate change had caused an almost 200% increase so almost doubled the area burnt by wildfires since the 1970s people are saying now $150 billion doar the most expensive fire in US history and presumably in world history so as a climate journalist you look at this and you say this is one of those kind of key events in the history of our the whole planet's understanding of the potential impact of climate change [Music] we're just letting everybody know where we're at

we're taking donations any types there's there's anything from kids supplies uh pet supplies uh food anything you could think of that we could help you with uh there was a lady here offering housing for uh people that have lost homes we're just trying to help in any way possible in a hard time like this I came here because I'm in need house lost my house my childhood home it's just devastating this is crazy City I grew up in is gone we wanted to see if we could get water cuz that was the that's the mostly

thing that we're worried about the water um you know we need water Prince Harry and his wife Megan have been meeting some of the First Responders and victims of the fires at a world Central kitchen site where food is being distributed the couple spoke and as you see hugged some of the people who had been affected by the eaten fire it's believed that they had already contributed clothing children's items and other essential supplies the governor of California has called for an independent investigation into whether water shortages hindered efforts to control the wildfires that have devastated

parts of Los Angeles firefighters are still trying to contain the blazes beautiful job by Saturday six fires were burning poor air quality caused by billowing Ash and smoke prompted the authorities to declare a local Health Emergency the number of dead climbed to 11 determining the cause of these fires is critical and to that end mayor bass Chief CR and I are announcing in conjunction with our partner agencies the creation of the Los Angeles Regional Wildfire investigative task force this task force is made up of local state and federal Partners designed to investigate the cause of

these fires and to see if there's any connection between them at least 16 people have died since Tuesday and about a dozen others are missing four large fires are still burning and officials say that the threat will remain high until Wednesday because of strong winds to all LA County residents please be assured that we will continue to battle these wildfires from the air and on the ground until they are fully contained We Stand alongside all of you as we begin repopulation of evacuated areas establishment of Disaster Recovery centers and the rebuilding of your homes your

communities and your lives watching the fires develop sitting kind of a struck seeing this kind of vision of Apocalypse in one of the greatest cities on Earth burning it was a cataclysmic fire California will be probably asking itself big questions you can't stop or prevent wildfires as such especially in the climate that California has it will have to look into various ways to manage the potential and the ways they tackle the fires in the future is especially as it's becoming a a growing threat on every month of the year and over wider areas the imagery

of La has become black and white you know it's Ash and and charred burnt material this sort of ghostly landscape that's emerged from a place we're all familiar with because we've all seen the movies we know what La looks like we know the palm trees and the Green Grass and now you see this sort of really degraded frankly terrifying kind of uh shattered landscape the people here will never forget these fires that ushered in the new year and the scale of the tragedy is really difficult to overstate yes much of the physical damage to homes

and businesses that can be put right but the lives of some have been changed forever with many people wandering because the Fire season is getting longer and longer how are they going to cope next time [Music] you [Music]