LA fires as it happened: Death toll rises as residents return to scenes of devastation

On Amalfi Drive in the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood of Los Angeles, luxury homes owned by celebrities are still standing. But at the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates, a mobile home community on Pacific Coast Highway just across from the beach, all of the nearly 200 homes are destroyed.

“Nothing but ruins,” said Maria Nol, who lived in a mobile home there with her daughter, her son-in-law and her three grandchildren.

Nol was one of many people who worked and struggled their way to a middle-class life but now been she is digging through rubble for anything that remains.

“The media is advertising and publicising all the celebrities that lost their homes, but the people who live here inherited homes from their parents who bought in the ’70s,” Nol’s daughter, Lynda Park, 43, said on Friday.

Park had worked at the Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church. That also burned to the ground. So did the home of the family her mother worked for as a cleaner.

Read more in the New York Times

LA Mayor Karen Bass has urged Angelenos to stick together ahead of predicted worsening conditions on Monday and Tuesday in the second-largest city in the United States.

In a post on social media platform X, Bass urged people to “stick together and … stand strong”.

“To any of you and all of you who have experienced a loss, the grief, the anger, the just utter shock – I’ve seen the devastation,” she said.

“It is unbelievable, the amount of loss that people have experienced, but we have to get through this crisis, and I know that we will.”

There are now 16 reported deaths from the Los Angeles fires, 11 attributed to the Eaton fire and five to the Palisades fire.

The latest update from the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office says human remains have been confirmed for 10 of the cases.

Officials have said they expect the death toll to keep increasing, with some fire-ravaged areas still unsafe for crews to search for remains.

Captain Mike Lorenz from the LA Police Department has revealed looters have posed as firefighters in the midst of the devastation being wrought on communities across Los Angeles.

The number of arrests was “continuously growing”, he said, with a further seven people arrested in recent days.

“We even made the arrest of two individuals that were actually posing as firefighters coming in and out of houses,” Lorenz said.

“So we’re paying very, very close attention to everybody that’s coming through.”

Some residents – frightened of looters stealing from their homes while residents were subject to evacuation orders – had hired security guards to monitor their homes, Lorenz told a Palisades community forum on Saturday evening (Sunday afternoon AEDT).

However, he said some looters had posed as security guards in an attempt to get around evacuation orders.

“We’re vetting those individuals as carefully as we can, and they’re also being monitored by LAPD personnel, if we can decide that they’re going to be inside the evacuation zone and monitoring residences.”

On average, about 10 looters were being detained every day, Lorenz said.

Fire crews are using unmanned drones in addition to water bombing aircraft in their fight against the uncontrolled wildfires burning in Los Angeles, as authorities pleaded with residents to be patient as the mammoth firefighting effort continues.

CalFire Operations Chief Christian Litz told a Palisades community forum that drones were being flown over residential areas to look for “heat signatures”.

“And what that allows us is, we can put people directly where we find that heat, and we can really dig in deep and get the water on there,” he said.

Meteorologist Rich Thompson, from the Storm Prediction Centre, said before the fires started last week there had been no discernible rain since April last year, conditions had been tinder dry, and fires had been fuelled by strong, dry Santa Ana wind gusts.

More Santa Ana wind gusts are forecast in coming days, although Thompson said they would not reach the same ferocity as last week, reaching perhaps 60 to 70 per cent of the strength of last week’s wind gusts.

The worst conditions would hit on Tuesday, he said.

Joe Everett, Assistant Chief of the Los Angeles City Fire Department, pleaded for residents to be patient with the firefighting efforts.

“I ask you please, I know it’s frustrating, but please be patient,” he told residents.

“We’re working extremely hard to contain and maintain any further damage, and we’re still aggressively fighting fire up there … Please be patient with us.”

Good afternoon, I’m Bianca Hall, taking over from Josefine Ganko as we continue to monitor the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles.

Authorities are this afternoon bracing for more Santa Ana winds until Wednesday. The National Weather Service issued a “red flag” warning that fire conditions will be “elevated to critical” until Wednesday.

“Moderate to locally strong Santa Ana winds will affect the typical Santa Ana Wind Corridors on Saturday to Sunday and again Monday through Wednesday,” the service reported.

“These winds combined with dry air and dry vegetation will keep the fire weather threat in the area.”

The Santa Ana winds have fuelled the mid-winter wildfires, after a lengthy period of drought in LA.

As my colleague Nick O’Malley reported last week, LA – which by now should be in the midst of its wet season – has received only about six millimetres of rain since July, its second driest such stretch in nearly 150 years of record keeping.

Santa Ana winds typically strike the region around Christmas.

The Santa Ana winds blow in from the desert, abandon most of the little moisture they contain as they cross the San Bernardino Mountains that divide the coastal plain from the interior of the state, and then blast down towards the Pacific coast.

Anna Yeager said she and her husband agonised over going back to their Altadena neighbourhood near Pasadena after fleeing with their daughter, 6, their son, 3, and their two dogs. A neighbour had told them their house was gone.

Now she regrets not grabbing her children’s artwork, her husband’s treasured cookbooks, family photos, jewellery from her mother, who died in 2012, and items from her husband’s grandmother, who survived Auschwitz.

When the couple returned, they just saw rows and rows of chimneys.

“Power lines everywhere. Fires still going everywhere” she said, adding that when they walked up to their home “it was just dust”.

“You build a world for yourself and your family, and you feel safe in that world and things like this happen that you cannot control,” she said. “It’s devastating.”

There were remnants of the front porch where Yeager had photographed her children nearly daily since 2020.

“The porch is still there and it’s to me, it’s a sign to rebuild and not leave,” she said. “You know, it’s like saying, ‘Hey, I’m still here. You can still do this.’”

AP

Staff at the Getty Centre, which sits on a hillside overlooking Los Angeles and is one of the city’s premier cultural institutions, are closely watching the nearby Palisades fire that crept closer on Saturday.

“We’ve been told to anticipate stronger winds later in the day,” Katherine Fleming, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, said in a statement.

“Our galleries are safe and protected. Aside from a few hot spots, the Villa remains stable.”

On Saturday, flames appeared to spread east to Mandeville Canyon and closer to Interstate 405, where a busy mountain pass and the Getty Centre are located.

The Palisades fire has burnt more than 8900 hectares and is at just 11 per cent containment, according to Cal Fire, which said in an afternoon update that north-to-northeast winds would gradually increase and peak in strength on Saturday evening and overnight (LA time).

“We continue to be acutely aware of our Getty neighbours and hope for their safety, and that of the whole region,” Fleming said in her statement.

Washington Post