The iconic landscape of Los Angeles County and its surrounding region have been forever transformed by a massive, multi-front firestorm that has leveled an area more than twice the size of
Even as four wildfires continued to burn in Los Angeles County Wednesday, the blazes were already rewriting the record books.
The wildfires in Southern California have led to the evacuations of over 130,000 people and have destroyed over 10,000 structures. Overlaying the wildfire outbreak across other major U.S. cities shows that the blaze is one of the worst in United States history, as it continues to spread across residential areas in Los Angeles.
For more perspective, Central Park in NYC is only 843 acres. So, the wildfire is currently the equivalent of almost 24 Central Parks combined. Actually, the entirety of Manhattan is 14,600 acres, or 22.81 square miles, so the Palisades Fire is bigger than the whole borough.
Red Flag warnings advising of extreme wildfire danger expired across the Los Angeles area late on Wednesday but one remained for an area east of the metro area, where winds were expected to be 15 to 25 miles (25-40 km) per hour with gusts to 40 mph, the National Weather Service said.
The damage the Southern California wildfires have inflicted in the Los Angeles area so far is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars.
The Palisades Fire, the largest and the first to spark, has grown quickly because of the dry and vicious Santa Ana winds after igniting Tuesday morning. As of Friday, the fire has scorched through 20,438 acres in Malibu and Pacific Palisades and is at 8% containment as of 10:43 a.m., according to Cal Fire.
What this means, the newspaper explains, is that proper management is not really about preventing wildfires "but instead preventing points of ignition within communities by employing 'home-hardening' strategies—proper landscaping, fire-resistant siding—and enjoining neighbors in collective efforts such as brush clearing."
Police say that they were dispatched to the waterline at the 3500 block of the strand just after 7 p.m. after receiving reports that the man's body had washed ashore.
A growing force of firefighters and equipment moved into the Los Angeles area as another round of powerful winds threatened to trigger new wildfires and set back recent progress in containing blazes that have destroyed thousands of homes and