High winds with gusts up to 100 mph hit the greater Los Angeles area yesterday, starting brush fires that have since burned more than an estimated 1,000 buildings and taken two lives so far, the Los Angeles Times reports. It’s difficult to describe the scale of the devastation, but to help put it into perspective, so many people have abandoned their cars in Pacific Palisades, they’re using bulldozers to push them out of the way and make room for emergency crews, KTLA reports.
There are reportedly three main fires — the Palisades fire, which the LA Times says already destroyed more than 5,000 acres, the Eaton fire, which has burned about 2,200 acres and the smaller Hurst fire, which has burned about 500 acres. As you can see in the video below, drivers desperate to escape the fires have turned to abandoning their vehicles in such large numbers that emergency crews couldn’t get through. In their panic, many drivers also took their keys with them, leaving officials with little choice but to bulldoze them out of the way.
Clearing the cars out of the way definitely damages them, but in the middle of a wildfire, it’s not like they have any other choice. And anyone who returns and finds their car destroyed will at least still be alive. It would have been nice if they’d left the keys and hadn’t parked in the middle of the road when they bailed, but those are minor issues compared to the risk the fire poses to people’s lives.
The state does have plenty of experience fighting wildfires, and much of the damaged property will be insured, but we’re still talking about more than 1,000 homes and businesses that literally just went up in smoke. If there’s any good news, it’s that the strong winds driving the spread of these fires are expected to die down this afternoon, giving firefighters a better shot at containing the blazes. And fingers crossed we’ve seen the last of the fatalities, too.
