Live updates: Los Angeles wildfires largely contained

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It’s not enough to trust the senses to know when it’s a bad air day. Well before you can see or smell smoke, it can start wreaking havoc on the lungs.

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Firefighters around Los Angeles have been making steady progress against the massive, fast-moving blazes that erupted around the city this month. The containment perimeters around the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire are growing, but the risk of another explosive wildfire remains high amid dry conditions and high winds.

Why do disasters happen?

The ancient Greeks had an all-purpose explanation, as I’ve been learning from my Greek myth-mad 7-year-old son: the gods.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles for over 15 years. I moved here in fall 2008 to follow my dreams and attend journalism school, and like so many Angelenos, my goal has always been to turn my passions into reality (and pay the rent while doing it). Doing all this against a backdrop of breathtaking blue skies and picturesque palm trees didn’t hurt either.

After spending my adolescence in the San Francisco Bay Area, it feels almost heretic to call Los Angeles home, but I’m not ashamed. I loudly proclaim that LA is my home. It’s where my friends and I lounged on LACMA’s lawn (the affectionate shorthand for Los Angeles County Museum of Art) to watch jazz in the summertime; where I learned that no matter how badly they want you to call it Crypto.com Arena, it will forever and always be the Staples Center; it’s where you can guarantee that no matter how your night is going, the tantalizing, comfortingly familiar scents wafting from the nearest taco stand are never too far away. It’s where I internalized that you better gun it at the Beverly and La Cienega intersection’s unprotected left turn before the light turns red, lest your fellow road ragers erupt in a perfectly timed symphony of bleating car horns and brightly colored language.

Earlier this month, as wildfires tore through Los Angeles, killing at least 25 people and forcing well over 100,000 people to evacuate, or try to, then-President-elect Donald Trump decided to point his ire toward a fish. Not the severe Santa Ana winds that fueled the fires. Not the unusually dry weather. Not the steady march of home development into fire-prone areas.

A fish.

It is often said that climate disasters are great equalizers. They rip through neighborhoods, rich and poor, devastating communities and upending lives without discriminating between them.

But it is, of course, not that simple.

Wildfires are on the mind here in California. It’s still not clear exactly to what degree the devastating Los Angeles fires were the product of gross mismanagement by the city and state governments, with lots of new details still emerging about the steps they could have taken and didn’t.

It’s abundantly clear that the city and state screwed up. State insurance price controls forced homeowners off good private insurance and onto the last-resort state insurance program, which is about to go catastrophically bankrupt, passing on its liabilities to every homeowner in the state. Reservoirs that should have been full were empty. The city government had plenty of reason to believe that risk was catastrophically elevated this week, but the mayor took an international trip and the fire department seems to have been caught flat-footed.

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The Los Angeles wildfires, in the course of a week, killed at least 25 people, burned more than 30,000 acres, and displaced thousands of people and wildlife from their homes. It’s a difficult time for Los Angeles residents — and yet, even in the face of crisis, people are mobilizing to support those in need, especially in neighborhoods that have faced the brunt of destruction like the Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, and Altadena.

In the coverage of the wildfires that have torn through the Los Angeles area this month, you may have seen some familiar faces among the survivors. Prominent celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Adam Brody and Leighton Meester, and Mel Gibson, have had their houses and in some cases their sources of livelihood destroyed. How the rich and famous, in addition to regular Angelenos, have had their lives upended by this natural disaster have been an integral part of the media’s coverage of the fires.

Media coverage has pointed to a litany of reasons for the fires’ intense destructivity, ranging from its potential points of origin to manmade factors like increased urban development. There’s also been a revolution in attribution science — the ability to connect climate change to acute extreme-weather events. In fact, a new scientific analysis out of the University of California Los Angeles published this week concluded that climate change intensified the city’s devastating wildfires. At the same time, it’s unclear if Americans are making the connection between the devastation of the fires and climate change: Although a recent poll conducted by Emerson College found that a majority of respondents identified climate change as a major cause of the fires, CNN reported Americans’ overall concern about climate change hasn’t budged in decades.

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Kids lose so much when a disaster strikes. Too many have lost family members to the wildfires that have raged across Los Angeles in recent days. They’ve lost homes. They’ve lost the sense of security and predictability that so many kids depend on. And, to add insult to injury, many of them have lost their schools.

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As fires continue to rage in and around Los Angeles, burning more than 40,000 acres since last week, destroying more than 12,000 homes and other buildings, and killing at least 25 people, two things are becoming clear: California must rebuild quickly, and it must rebuild differently.

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The wildfires engulfing the Los Angeles area might reshape what Southern California will look like for years to come. Within a week, approximately 30,000 acres of land have burned, thousands forced to evacuate from their homes, and at least 24 people lost their lives, as of Tuesday morning.

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Fires in and around Los Angeles continue to rage as gusting Santa Ana winds drive the flames through brush and into neighborhoods. Two major blazes, the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire, have combined burned almost 40,000 acres since last week. Another fire, the Auto Fire, erupted Monday evening in Ventura County. The fires have killed at least 24 people.

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Sustained powerful winds reaching nearly 100 miles per hour are driving fast-moving wildfires near Los Angeles, spewing smoke, destroying homes, closing roads, and forcing thousands of people to evacuate.

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In the midst of the devastating wildfires that have raged through the Los Angeles area over the last week, thousands of residents are grappling with the fallout, from the tangible losses — more than 12,000 structures were damaged or destroyed — to the sentimental — generations of memories gone. What can be even more overwhelming for victims is figuring out what to do next and how to begin to recover.

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In just four days, blazing wildfires across Los Angeles neighborhoods have put 150,000 residents under evacuation orders, burned over 30,000 acres, destroyed more than 10,000 structures, and, as of Thursday, killed killed 10 people. Experts say it may be the costliest wildfire in US history. The fires are still ongoing, and the toll of destruction is still far from a final tally.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On Tuesday, after a ferocious Santa Ana windstorm blew through Southern California, a severe brush fire broke out in the wealthy Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, burning at least 1,000 structures and forcing hundreds of thousands of residents to evacuate as of Thursday morning. Another large brush fire broke out near Pasadena around the same time, killing at least two people. Together the two blazes threatened some of the most valuable homes and businesses in the United States. The damage from the Palisades Fire alone could exceed $10 billion, according to a preliminary estimate from JP Morgan.

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Multiple major wildfires, fanned by unusually strong seasonal winds, are currently burning through the Los Angeles area, leaving devastation in their wake.

The term “climate haven” never made much sense. After Hurricane Helene dumped two feet of rain on western North Carolina, many major media outlets marveled at how Asheville, which had been celebrated as a climate haven, had been devastated by a climate-related disaster.

Some in the media later reported accurately that climate havens don’t actually exist. But that still raises the question: Where did this climate haven concept even come from?

This story is the second feature in a Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future.

Silas Yamamoto’s favorite part of his job is starting fires.

The Park Fire, a wildfire in Northern California spanning over 370,000 acres, has rapidly become the fifth largest in the state’s history, prompting evacuations in four counties.

The fire, which officials say was started by arson, has grown in the past week as the western US eyes what could be another potent wildfire season. A combination of strong vegetation growth due to heavy precipitation over the past few years, and high temperatures this summer could mean larger wildfires in the coming months.

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Several US states are again experiencing an influx of wildfire smoke as Canada’s summer fire season gets underway. Due to the scale of the wildfires and natural weather patterns, enormous amounts of smoke are drifting southward — much like last year.