The Daily - L.A. on Fire

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

Over the past 48 hours, wildfires have consumed acre after acre and building after building across greater Los Angeles. More than 100,000 people have been ordered to evacuate, and at least five people have died.The Times’s L.A. bureau chief, Corina Knoll, and our staff meteorologist, Judson Jones, explain the paths of the fires and the conditions that have made them so hard to contain.Guests: Corina Knoll, the Los Angeles bureau chief for The New York Times, covering Southern California; and Judson Jones, a meteorologist and reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: Follow the latest news on the California wildfires.Catch up on what we know about the fires.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

My name is Orly Israel. I live with my family in the Pacific Bosphates. I found out about the fire about, must have been like 10 a.m. when someone texted me, is everything okay? To which I said, about what? And I said, the fire. And I looked out the window and there's this huge plume of smoke just coming over the mountains. And it's big. And, you know, living in Los Angeles, there are fires around fairly often. And, you know, seeing smoke is not an unusual thing. Uh, but this was really close. And we start getting automatic evacuation warning, and the fire was getting closer and

closer and you could see it from the bedroom window. You could see the flames waterfall down this hill towards the town. The embers were just flying to the sky like a rain of fire. And the sound of a fire, I never would have thought the sound of. You know, it sounds like an airport. It's busy and blazing. We have these two garden hoses and you know, a bush would catch on fire and we'd spray the bush and then another bush would catch on fire and you know eventually the fence

caught on fire, the wooden fence between our house and the next house and it was just too hot and too many embers and couldn't get close enough to it to spray it with the hose without getting burned. I went, you know, should we fight this? We were wearing swimming, you know, pool goggles and N95 masks and we just couldn't do it, you know, so, too gone out of there. You know, I'm thinking about my family, I'm thinking about any future plans I had, or totally. Out the window, you know, it really makes me think about, that's when I packed my value goals, I thought, well, these are the most important things to me, and now I get to live with knowing that I chose those things.

And I don't think I'm aware enough of the consequences of this to be heartbroken yet. But I think it's just wait for the bad news that the house is completely gone and then wait until they let us come take through the rubble. From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Ketroef and this is The Daily. In the last 48 hours, devastating wildfires have consumed more than 25,000 acres in Los Angeles, with more than 100,000 households being told to evacuate. As flames surround the city, thousands of structures have burned to the ground, and at least five people have died. Today my colleague LA Bureau Chief Karina Noll on the fire's path of

destruction and our staff meteorologist Judson Jones on the conditions that have made them so hard to contain. It's Thursday, January 9th. Karina, we're talking to you at 4.30 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, a day after these extraordinary fires broke out. You're in Los Angeles. Starting at the beginning, can you tell us what this has all looked like from the ground? So we knew that there was going to be really high winds in our area. It's something that we're a little bit used to down here, and it's not something that I think we get too worried about, but we were hearing from forecasters that it was going to be pretty extreme. So Tuesday morning I was just trying

to prep a story about the wind and working with reporters in the field who were kind of telling me that, oh, okay, people are at hardware stores, prepping, buying candles, generators, in case the power goes out. Then everything changed at about 10 30 a.m. That's when a fire broke out in this neighborhood called the Pacific Palisades. It just suddenly became a fire story. Karina, help orient us a little bit.

Where is that? Where is this area of the Pacific Palisades? What's it like there? So the Pacific Palisades? What's it like there? So the Pacific Palisades is a neighborhood that's out on the west side. It's partially coastal. It's very hilly. It's in the Santa Monica Mountains, has about 24,000 residents. It's considered more affluent. And I think what sort of struck us is that, of course, we're used to wildfires here in Southern California, but it breaking

out in the Pacific Palisades because it's such a heavily populated area, that's when we get really nervous about fires here. Right. It sounds like this is a place where potentially a lot of people are in danger. Yeah. When we started hearing about the evacuation orders, I pulled up a map and looked at the neighborhood and it's a hillside neighborhood and you have all of these winding roads and a lot of them are

cul-de-sacs or dead ends and I remember just thinking you know it's going to be really terrible for there to be a mass evacuation right now. And can you take us through kind of what it looks like when people start to flee that area? People were getting in their cars but getting trapped on certain streets. Legendary Sunset Boulevard is a nightmarish scene today. And they were trying to make their way down to what's called Pacific Coast Highway or PCH. The iconic street was the main route for tens of thousands of residents escaping the fires

fueled by lashing... So there was only a small section of it that people could get to and that was really clogged. So people had just abandoned their cars. Yeah, what happened? Why did you have to get out and go? You know, we thought everything was going to be fine. We were just going to go down a sunset to PCH and just get out of there. But the flames started like palm trees near us started catching on fire and either a fireman or a policeman started telling everybody get out of your car if you want to live. There's even this moment when a local news anchor is interviewing somebody in the Pacific Palisades.

There's an important announcement I wonder if I could just make. If anybody has a car and they leave their car, leave the keys in the car. And he's sort of pleading with viewers and residents, hey, leave your keys in your car if you do abandon it. Because then he and others could help move the cars out of the way for the fire department. And then I think at one point a reporter asks him his name. My name is Steve Gutenberg. Steve, do you live in this area? I live in the area, yeah, I live right up the hill.

He replies, Steve Gutenberg, which is a famous actor. You're an actor? Yeah, I'm an actor. Okay, now you look familiar to me now. Yeah. So sir, do you have a... It's this very LA moment where you have a Hollywood actor trying to help clear the roads.

actor trying to help clear the roads. That is just so surreal. And it really gives you a sense of how trapped everyone in the path of this fire felt. I mean, what do we know about the scale of the damage at this point? Oh, man. We just arrived here in what is left of downtown Pacific Palisades and I am overwhelmed by the scale of loss. People are trying to save their homes before they're completely engulfed and then moments later the flames have taken it over. I mean there's just fire everywhere you can see flames jumping up above the tree line there. Near the fire, the sky is a very deep orange.

There are burned out carcasses of cars that have just been left behind. The grocery stores are gone, both of them. The gas stations are gone. Doctors' offices are gone. The public library where I grew up going as a child and have brought my own children, gone. It all feels like dramatic cinematic scene pieces but they're real.

Wow that is a Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church or what is left of it. Those are remnants of a beautiful church. And from everything we've heard the Pacific Palisades has just been ravaged and iconic businesses, places that have been around for decades, have just burned to the ground. And it's still spreading. All of these other wildfires keep cropping up and some of them are very manageable and not a big deal,

but there are two that also start to threaten areas around the city and in the city. One is in Eaton Canyon, it's called Eaton Fire, which I think is already up to more than 10,000 acres. And then there's one called the Hearst Fire, which is in Sylmar, which is still in the city of Los Angeles, but it's in the San Fernando Valley, so it's more up north. Okay, so now there are multiple fires encroaching on Los Angeles. What does that feel like?

It's surreal. You look at a map of the fires and you see them kind of dotting all around our city. Feels a bit like a ring of fire, which is kind of terrifying. And the fact that they are sort of encroaching more on the city of Los Angeles makes it feel like this is one of the most major events that people here have ever experienced. It honestly sounds incredibly scary. Karina, what can you tell us about the efforts to fight these fires so far?

The fires are far from being contained and it's sort of a precarious situation right now. Firefighters are really just facing these terrible conditions and they need more manpower. They have a lack of water supply apparently from hydrants. The federal government is also sending helicopters, but because of the winds, those helicopters that are meant to sort of drop water on the flames from above, they've been grounded. They haven't been able to fly because it's unsafe. So these extreme conditions are just going to continue. And I think overall, it just means a huge

devastating loss for the city of Los Angeles. Karina, you kind of mentioned that people in LA and in some of these areas are used to the idea of having wildfires in the area. Climate change has turned it into a kind of a hotbed for these kinds of blazes year after year. And yet it seems like the scale of this fire and the location means that people aren't just near a wildfire, they are in a wildfire and an enormous one. And I wonder if that's going to change how people who live in these communities see their home. how people who live in these communities see their home.

Yeah, I think this is a kind of a weird wake up call for us. You know, we do get wildfires in Southern California, even ones that are in our county. But I think ones that really encroach upon our city or even devastate portions of our city, that's something new that we're feeling. the state portions of our city, that's something new that we're feeling. And what's unique about Los Angeles is how sprawling it is. It's a huge, huge spread out city and we have 4 million people. So I think in a city like LA, which we're very disconnected from other neighborhoods,

usually we live a really localized life. And it's really about just kind of your area. But this is something that I feel like the entire city is feeling something about. This fire, it sounds like, was just big enough and violent enough, fast enough to make everyone in LA feel like they were living in one place that is threatened by the same forces. I mean, this event is really historic for Los Angeles. It's something you can't ignore here, no matter where you live, no matter where your neighborhood is. Karina, thank you.

Thank you for having me. After the break, Times meteorologist Judson Jones on how these fires started and why they're so hard to control. We'll be right back. Judson, we just heard from our colleague, Karina, who's on the ground in LA and who described the devastation caused by these fires encircling Los Angeles. You're our staff meteorologist. So we want to ask you to help us understand how these fires started and why they spread

so quickly. You know, a lot of this actually begins all the way back in the summer. Usually in this area of the world, the summer months, it's typically drier in Southern California. By the fall and into the winter, you start to kind of get these patterns where you get a little bit more rain, but it's been parched.

Like the vegetation is crisp, and that's because they have seen hardly any rain. This winter, we haven't seen this precipitation in Tether, California. So it's basically like kindling for a fire. And then you get the Santa Ana winds. These are winds that Hollywood has romanticized in movies from the past, and they happen every winter. But when you have these dry conditions and you haven't had that movies from the past, and they happen every winter. But when you have these dry conditions

and you haven't had that rainfall in the fall, these winds can create havoc. JELENA DRAZNICKI-VALENTINA J. J. J. J. J. J. Judson, I want to just pause for a minute on the Santa Ana winds. I think generally people may have a vague idea of what these winds are, but help us understand what this actually looks like.

Yeah, the Santa Ana winds are really winds that kind of come out of the north, northeast. And it happens because the atmosphere has this thing called high pressure. You've probably all seen the H's and the L's on weather maps historically. With wind, wind moves towards low pressure. And so you get this higher pressure

in the Western part of the U.S. And then you have some lower pressure off the ocean. And so that high pressure is sitting there and it's trying to get to the low pressure. And so what it does is it actually pushes through the mountains. And in this case, the pressure difference was so strong that it was actually, the wind is crashing into the mountains. And in this case, the pressure difference was so strong that it was actually, the wind is crashing into the mountains.

So kind of like how a wave hits a rock and crashes over. We're seeing that wind, you know, 50 miles per hour or even higher, crash into the mountains and come up over the other sides. Okay, so how does all of this, these parched conditions, the Santa Ana winds, come together over the past 48 hours or so to create these fires? Well, initially, you needed ignition. And that's what we saw Tuesday morning.

There was some kind of spark somewhere by somebody or something, right? Like these things can happen because someone just flicked a cigarette out their window and it caught on fire by grass. You can also get this just because someone's chain connected to their trailer going down the highway creates a spark. It doesn't take much with these dry conditions

to get a fire going. And then when the winds, as we saw yesterday, started to increase in intensity, these little sparks turned into raging fires. The Eden fire exploded Wednesday morning in size, and that had a lot to do with because there were wind gusts near that area of a hundred miles per hour. Wow. At one point in time, the Palisades fire was increasing at a rate of three football fields every minute. So that's just really how quickly these fires can expand. It's amazing to hear the actual, you know, 100 mile an hour wind figure.

What does that do to a spark, to a number? Right. I mean, just imagine 100 miles per hour is stronger than a category one hurricane, right? A category one hurricane starts at 74 miles per hour. So you're getting gusts near these fires that are reaching a hundred miles per hour. So, I mean, you can just imagine that already creates destruction and downed trees and power lines, but it also is going to push this wildfire faster and faster. We're talking about a hurricane of a fire here, basically. Yeah.

I mean, when you have winds that are gusting to 50, 60, even 100 miles per hour, homes are no match to this wildfire. In fact, they are like a matchbox. I have to ask Judson just about how fire prone this area is in general. I mean, there are places across Southern California that we've come to think of as places that just burn based on these recurring conditions. Is that the case here? I mean, the reason people move to Southern California a lot of times is because of the

weather. This is a beautiful area. It's this interface with wild landscape and mountainous terrain down to the beaches. Like it's a beautiful area and there is vegetation. There is stuff that does burn. And when you have this large population and a mountainous terrain against these national forests,

the potential for wildfires is there. Especially when we're seeing these ebbs and flows from really, really extreme wet years to really, really extreme drought, like we're seeing this year. Finally, Judson, if wind is really at the center of this fire, does that mean the fire only ends when the winds die down?

And do we know when that might be? As the winds ease, the threat isn't over. Until they get rain, this is going to continue to be a problem through the winter months. And as of right now, another, although weaker Santa Ana event is likely. And then we're looking at potentially another event next week. So it sounds like this fire, which hasn't been contained thus far, is really not over. It's far from over, unfortunately. Judson, thank you so much. Thanks, Natalie.

On Wednesday evening, officials continued to expand evacuation warnings further and further throughout the Los Angeles region, including into the densely populated areas of Santa Monica, Pasadena, and Hollywood. High winds as fast as 70 miles an hour are expected to return Thursday afternoon and continue into Friday morning. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In an emergency application filed late Tuesday, Donald Trump's lawyers asked the Supreme Court to prevent the sentencing of the president-elect for his criminal conviction

in New York. The sentencing is scheduled for Friday, just 10 days before the inauguration, and stems from the case against the president-elect for a hush money payment made in 2016 to a porn star who was threatening to go public with her story of a sexual encounter with Trump. While the trial judge in the case has indicated that he would spare Trump jail time, his sentencing would be symbolically important because it would formalize his status as a felon. Trump has argued he's entitled to full immunity from sentencing now that he's president-elect, based on a Supreme Court ruling last year

that gave presidents broad immunity for official acts. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Shannon Lin, and Rachelle Bongia, with help from Alex Stern. It was edited by Mark George and MJ Davis Lynn, contains original music by Marian Lozano, Dan Powell, Alicia Beatu, Sophia Landman, and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsvierk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Isabella Kwai. That's it for the Daily. I'm Natalie Ketroweth. See you tomorrow.